What are flight curfews?

Night flying restrictions, or curfews, are in place at quite a few airports overseas, particularly in Europe. Some of the rules been around for a long time, but they have grown more common in recent years.

As the name suggests, curfews are regulations on flights during the nighttime hours.

Specifically, it’s a ban or limit on takeoffs and landings — well, scheduled ones, at least — between set late-night and early-morning hours.

Most often, these restrictions tend to take effect an hour or two before midnight and last until somewhere between 4 and 7 a.m.

The rules typically don’t completely eliminate those late night and early morning takeoffs and landings, but do seek to keep them to a minimum.

Why do curfews exist?

The sound jet engines make is a common, driving force behind night flying restrictions.

“You have people living around the airport who complain about noise,” former airline pilot and current University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor Dan Bubb told TPG. “Airports want to be good neighbors, they don’t want to be noisy neighbors, they don’t want to be bad neighbors.”

But air travel is, of course, a 24/7 operation, and “an important part of operations at airports around the world,” according to the website at London Heathrow Airport (LHR), which is one of the world’s largest airports, and one with night flying restrictions.

And some people feel these rules are too much of a burden.

“It places a lot of unneeded stress on pilots,” Bubb said, noting that, as a former pilot, he worries about pilots having to think about, as he put it, “beating the clock.”

There are exceptions for emergencies

Don’t worry, a curfew is unlikely keep your plane circling for hours on end, or make your pilot unable to land in the case of an emergency.

Generally, airports have exceptions to their curfew rules for emergencies and sometimes, even for delays, like when there’s bad weather.

For instance, in the United Kingdom, the government can make exceptions to allow additional night takeoffs or landings if delays are likely to lead to major congestion at the airport (or hardship for passengers from having their itineraries upended).

Where are curfews in place?

There are numerous overseas airports with some sort of night flying restriction, which are generally imposed and enforced by some combination of federal, local and airport authorities.

In addition to the rules at London’s Heathrow and Gatwick, and Stansted Airport (STN) also has a curfew in place at night.

As an example of how one such system works, Heathrow operates under a “night quota period” between 11:30 p.m. and 6 a.m., during which there are limits on aircraft takeoffs and landings set by the U.K.’s Department for Transport. The rules generally allow an average of 15 aircraft takeoffs or landings per night.

How can a curfew affect your flight?

If all goes smoothly with the timing of your flight, you probably won’t ever notice the effects of an airport’s curfew. After all, the flights are scheduled so as to comply with the restrictions.

As I found out, you could run into a brief delay when flying overnight to Europe if you’re running ahead of schedule; that’s most likely to happen on a flight departing from the East Coast in the early evening hours.

You could run into much more significant disruptions, though if your plan gets delayed to the point where it might be taking off or landing after the “quiet hours” begin. That could happen on a long-haul flight to a destination overseas or a short-hop trip in Europe.

“The airline might opt to cancel the flight and rebook the passengers on the next day’s flight,” Bubb explained.

Bottom line

While planes are in the air 24/7 around the globe, curfews are common in some parts of the world — especially Europe. Curfews place limits on when planes can take off or land. A curfew won’t keep a plane from landing in the midst of an emergency. However, they do explain the timing of some flights, and why a late-night flight delay could lead to a much longer itinerary disruption while abroad.