Landing at Madeira Airport (Funchal, ICAO LPMA, IATA FNC) is considered tricky because of the wind, and EUROCONTROL data for January 2018 – September 2026 bear this out: on days with a weather restriction on arrivals (arrival regulation), gusts of 30 knots or more showed up in 79% of cases, against just 14% on ordinary days. Fog, low cloud, snow and freezing rain went unrecorded in the reports on such days (0%). The restrictions themselves are rare: 85 days out of 3,184, that is 2.7%, and an average of 0.14 minutes of weather delay per arriving flight. By share of such days Madeira ranks 49th out of 94 airports on the site, somewhere in the middle of the table. Trouble on the island is uncommon, but when it does happen the cause is nearly always the same: weather accounted for 98% of all delay minutes from arrival restrictions.
Wind, months and years: how often weather slows down arrivals
A weather restriction on arrivals (arrival regulation, ATFM) is imposed by EUROCONTROL as Network Manager, with reason code W (weather). Aircraft flying to the island then wait on the ground for departure or hold in the air. A crosswind of 20 knots or more on the best runway was also more frequent than usual on restriction days, 4.7% against 0.4%, but gusts remain the main marker. On 20% of days with restrictions, nothing alarming appears in the airport's own METAR reports: the restriction is imposed on the strength of the forecast as well as weather on approach to the island.
The hardest day of the period was 4 March 2026: 1,699 minutes of weather delay across 74 arrivals, that is 23.0 minutes per flight, with gusts up to 35 knots. Restrictions fall most often in July and April (5% of days); October and November are the quietest (1%). Year to year the picture shifted noticeably. In 2019 there was not a single such day, in 2024 there were 15, in 2025 there were 25, and in January–September 2026 alone there were already 23. If you are picking dates for your trip, autumn is the calmest season by these figures.
What these figures do not show
EUROCONTROL counts only delays caused by arrival restrictions. Go-arounds, diversions and cancellations are not included in these numbers, nor do departure delays. A day with a restriction does not mean every flight ran late: the delay minutes are spread unevenly across that day's arrivals. So treat 2.7% as the frequency of difficult days, not as your chance of a cancellation. For comparison with the Canary Islands: Lanzarote had weather restrictions on 5.4% of days and Tenerife North on 4.1%, both more often than Madeira. Nearby routes are covered on the pages for Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura, Lisbon and Porto; how the shares of days are worked out is explained in the methodology.