Forty flights late, and hours of queuing: a typical day at Gatwick

As the industry's financial regulator threatens to resign, Britain's airports are severely overstretched and in need of extra cash

Gatwick Airport, 5am: glorious blue skies and clear views would seem to promise travellers the best possible chance of reaching their holiday destinations on time.

But the bloated queues snaking around the airport's South terminal and a one-in-seven chance of a severe flight delay tell a different story.

Those who had, perhaps wisely, chosen a weekday to depart for their beach resort of choice would have been perturbed by the sight of densely packed check-in desks, and, if they were among the passengers on the 40 flights subject to serious delays between 5am and 5pm at the busier of Gatwick's two terminals, they might have wished they had stayed at home.

The longest wait of Thursday's 300 departures – a whopping seven hours and 25 minutes – involved a Monarch flight to Faro, Portugal, which was due to leave at 6.50am and took off at 2.15pm because of technical problems.

But Gatwick's delays are by no means the worst of British airports, which have been stretched to capacity.

Despite the delays, Thursday was an average summer weekday at Gatwick, the second-largest airport in the UK. Domestic airports are having to deal with ever- increasing levels of air traffic.

Simon Evans, the chief executive of the Air Transport Users Council, said short-haul travel was particularly popular.

"Low-budget flights are cramming up the air paths, which causes the congestion up there and, consequently, in the airports," he said. Another cause of congestion and delay, he added, was the check-in system, where passengers were divided into different destination queues rather than using a more efficient common system in which passengers for all airline flights stand together in a fast-flowing queue.

The industry regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority, says that punctuality has improved at British airports this summer. A quarterly report found that 74 per cent of scheduled flights were on time during January to March this year, compared with 71 per cent in the same period last year.

Phil Blum, Gatwick's South terminal manager, said that, despite signs of overcrowding, long queues usually melted quickly and cancellation and delays were not a cause for grave concern.

But although Gatwick had 8 per cent fewer travellers this year, travel patterns had changed recently, creating "rush hours" at certain periods in the day. Mr Blum said: "The business of an airport used to be a lot more steady over the day whereas now there are peaks and troughs. One peak is at 2.30am when it is at its busiest but if you come back at points in the afternoon, it looks deserted." Gatwick, which currently handles about 31 million passengers a year, expects to spend £1bn building and improving facilities over the next 12 years.

John Cross, security manager at the South terminal, said passengers themselves had to claim some level of responsibility for congestion and delay. "From a security point of view, we issued a whole list of things that passengers should not travel with after 11 September, yet we are slowed down by some who insist they want to take sharp objects in such as nail files, which are on the list. We confiscate around 2,000 sharp items a day, which takes some time. Many will not know about the procedure and some will spend a long time arguing with us. And for others, this is the first summer they have travelled after 11 September and they are still not aware of the new guidelines," he said.

Travellers at Gatwick were split over their airport experiences. Julian Rodd, 40, a film maker from north London who has two children, languished in a long, lethargic queue at the check-in desk for Air Transat, the Canadian economy airline.

He said he had stopped travelling by air with his family after a particularly harrowing delay last year. "There are no facilities for children and no understanding for families dealing with delayed flights. I can't bear the prospect of being stranded in an airport and no one actually caring."

Waiting for her flight to Newark, New Jersey, Shawnee Sequeira felt otherwise. Ms Sequeira, 30, a businesswoman from Surrey who was brought up in America, said she had not experienced repeated delays and felt a lot safer at British airports. "The whole procedure is taking longer and I think this is mostly for security reasons and to be honest, I'd rather get on a safe plane and feel confident about the flight and be a little late than otherwise," she said.

She objected to those who travelled on economy airline tickets who were intolerant of delays. "If you pay £25 for a flight, you get what you pay for, including the possibility of delays. It's unreasonable and unrealistic to expect otherwise," she said.

Mr Rodd agreed: "People want to pay less so the service goes down. The problem is these budget flights are bringing the whole airport service down with them."