Stansted weather: what to expect, and when it affects your flight

For today and the next few days, use the Met Office forecast for London Stansted Airport, linked in the panel beside this page. There is a deliberate reason no temperature is printed here: these pages are static, rebuilt when the facts change rather than every hour, so a live number baked into the page would be wrong more often than right. The same applies to today's security queue and today's delays.

During a named storm the Met Office warnings page is the more useful of the two. A yellow or amber wind warning is the earliest reliable signal that a flying day will be untidy, and it usually appears a day or more before airlines start cancelling.

No forecast tells you whether your own flight is affected. That only shows on the boards, so check Stansted departures or Stansted arrivals on the day, and check the airline's app too: airlines normally cancel and re-book before the airport board catches up. Ryanair, the biggest operator here, pushes changes through its app first.

These are the Met Office 1991 to 2020 averages for Andrewsfield, the climate station nearest the airport and the official record for this part of Essex. Treat them as what a normal year looks like, not a forecast for yours. Andrewsfield does not report sunshine, so that column is not available for Stansted.

Rainfall is flat across the year, sitting between 37mm and 66mm every month, so there is no wet season to avoid and no dry one to aim for. The column that moves is frost: nine mornings in January, nine in December, none at all from June to September. If you are flying early between November and February, that is the column to plan around, because a frost morning means de-icing before departure.

Stansted sits at about 348 feet above sea level, which makes it the highest of the London airports: Gatwick is roughly 203 feet and Heathrow only 83. Combined with its position in open north-west Essex rather than inside the city, that gives Stansted a genuinely different winter from the airport most travellers compare it to.

The rainfall figures are within a millimetre of each other, which makes the frost gap the more telling number: 39 mornings a year here against 27 at Heathrow, half again as many. Heathrow sits inside the west London urban heat island, wrapped in city that holds its warmth overnight. Stansted has fields around it and a hundred metres of elevation, so on a clear winter night the temperature keeps falling here after it has levelled off in London.

Two practical consequences. Winter de-icing is a more regular feature of an early Stansted departure than an early Heathrow one, so leave a little more slack on a December or January morning flight. And when a snow event is marginal, Stansted is the London airport where it is most likely to settle rather than turn to rain. The drive in on the M11 is worth a thought on those mornings too, since the road out of the airport climbs.

Most weather does not delay flights. Rain does not, and neither does ordinary cold, heat or cloud. Three things genuinely disrupt Stansted, and one feature of the operation makes all three bite harder: a single runway working a schedule built on fast turnarounds, where a delay early in the day follows the same aircraft around Europe and back.

Fog is the main one. It rarely closes the airport, because the runway carries an instrument landing system good enough for very low visibility and most aircraft and crews are certified for it. What fog does is force air traffic control to put wider gaps between arriving aircraft, cutting the landings possible each hour. With one runway there is no second stream to absorb that, so an autumn or winter fog morning produces delays and some cancellations, and the knock-on runs all day.

Frost and de-icing come second, and they matter more here than at Heathrow for the reason above. Each aircraft has to be sprayed before departure, it takes several minutes, and there are a limited number of rigs. On the 06:00 wave that compounds quickly.

Storms are the third. A strong crosswind is the awkward case, and limits vary by aircraft type. Stansted's fleet is dominated by a single narrow-body type, which at least makes the airport's response consistent: when the wind is over the limit it is over the limit for most of the schedule at once. Airlines usually thin the schedule the day before a named storm, so check the evening before rather than on the morning.

In every case the forecast tells you whether disruption is plausible. Only the live boards and your airline tell you whether it is happening to you.

Weather delays work differently from other delays. Weather severe enough to make flying unsafe is an extraordinary circumstance under the UK261 rules, and that releases the airline from paying compensation. The fixed cash payouts that run into the hundreds of pounds do not apply to a fog morning or a storm.

What still applies, whatever the cause, is the duty of care. Past two hours late on a short-haul flight, which covers nearly everything from Stansted, the airline must provide meals and refreshments appropriate to the wait. If the delay runs into the next day it must provide a hotel and the transport to it. If the flight is cancelled outright you keep the choice between a full refund and re-routing to your destination, regardless of the weather.

Two practical notes. Airlines do not always offer the duty of care during weather disruption, when the desks are busiest, so ask for it. And if you end up buying your own meal or room because nobody was there to arrange one, keep every receipt and claim afterwards, because reasonable costs are recoverable even when compensation is not. Who to approach, and the escalation route to the Civil Aviation Authority, is on the contact page: the short version is that it is the airline's responsibility, not the airport's.