Report: Low-cost Hungarian Airline Operates World's Most Unreliable Flight

March 25, 2014— -- For most air travelers, departing on time is of the utmost importance.

Those air travelers may want to avoid one particular Wizz Air flight.

It's flight W62206 from London's Luton Airport to Budapest. The Telegraph reported the flight has not left on time once since June 1, 2013.

Delays have ranged from two minutes to 12 hours and 18 minutes since last summer, the newspaper reported.

Wizz Air is a Hungarian low-cost airline headquartered in Budapest. It flies from London's Luton to more than 20 cities in Eastern Europe.

Figures for the chronically-delayed flight were, according to The Telegraph, compiled by EUclaim, a site that helps passengers find out of they're entitled to compensation for delayed or cancelled flights. Flight W62206 had a total of 293 late departures in a row and up to 176 hours of waiting time for passengers on their way to Budapest.

But Wizz Air disputes the report.

In a statement emailed to ABC news and posted on its web site, the airline said, "Industry standards, applied by the CAA, define all flights departing within 15 mins of the scheduled departure time as on time while bounty hunters such as EU Claims mislead consumers by hiding this fact." The CAA is the Civil Aviation Authority.

And as the airline points out, travelers are generally less interested in departing on time than arriving on time. The airline said that more than 78 percent of all W62206 flights arrived on time in Budapest.

In the U.S., flights that depart late but still manage to arrive on time or early at their destination are usually flying on a padded schedule, a practice that's become commonplace in an effort to boost on-time arrival statistics.