London Luton Airport

London Luton Airport is the fifth-busiest airport in the London system after Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and London City, handling roughly 18M passengers (2024) across 199 weekly routes to 132 destinations on 17 airlines. LTN sits 56 km (35 mi) north of central London in Bedfordshire and functions as a dedicated low-cost carrier base — easyJet's single largest operating base anywhere in its network, alongside significant operations by Wizz Air and Ryanair. The airport competes directly with London Stansted for budget traffic to southern, central, and eastern Europe. Luton operates with a single 7,093 ft (2,162 m) runway (07/25), one of the shortest among major European airports, which limits its use by widebody aircraft and restricts long-haul service. The compact terminal was significantly expanded in 2022 under a £160M redevelopment that added a new arrivals pier and doubled floor space, bringing annual capacity to 18M — although the airport is already operating at that limit and a planning application for a second terminal and 32M capacity is under government review. LTN sits at 526 ft (160 m) elevation, making it the highest of the major London airports and occasionally subject to fog closures uncommon at sea-level Heathrow and Gatwick. Network reach is exclusively short and medium haul, weighted heavily toward leisure destinations in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and eastern European cities — Wizz Air's Budapest, Warsaw, Bucharest, and Sofia markets are particularly dense. Business traffic is relatively light. A distinctive operational feature is the Luton DART (Direct Air-Rail Transit), a 1.4 mi (2.3 km) cable-hauled people-mover opened in 2023 that connects the terminal to Luton Airport Parkway railway station in under 4 minutes, replacing the previous shuttle-bus link and cutting central-London travel times substantially.