Heathrow airport cancelled more than 60 flights on Monday and warned it may have to ask airlines to remove more as it struggles to cope with the rebound in travel demand after the coronavirus pandemic.
The flights were spread across Terminals 3 and 5, with British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Air France among the airlines affected, disrupting plans for about 10,000 passengers.
“We are expecting higher passenger numbers in Terminals 3 and 5 today than the airport currently has capacity to serve, and so to maintain a safe operation we have asked some airlines in Terminals 3 and 5 to remove a combined total of 61 flights from the schedule,” an airport spokesperson said.
“We apologise for the impact to travel plans and we are working closely with airlines to get affected passengers rebooked on to other flights.”
Affected passengers included 70 musicians from the London Symphony Orchestra, who were left stranded after playing music by the Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky at a weekend festival in Granada, Spain, with the guest conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner. They were forced to take a five-hour coach from Málaga to Gibraltar to catch alternative flights home.
Passengers at Heathrow and other airports including Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester have reported persistent problems with huge queues to pass through security, lost hold baggage, and the regular failure to send staff to help travellers with mobility problems – resulting in hours-long waits on empty planes for those in wheelchairs who cannot leave without the correct equipment.
Heathrow said on Monday 6 million passengers travelled through the airport in June – the equivalent of 40 years of growth in only four months – and 25m in the first six months of 2022. That compared with only 19.4 million passengers across the whole of 2021.
“Despite our best efforts, there have been periods in recent weeks where service levels have not been acceptable, with long queue times, delays for passengers with reduced mobility, bags not travelling with passengers or arriving late, and we want to apologise to any passengers who have been affected by this,” it said in a statement to the stock market on Monday morning.
It also said it would “carefully assess” airlines’ cuts to summer schedules, after the UK government pushed a “slot amnesty” to allow carriers to cancel flights without losing their share of access rights to airports.
The Heathrow chief executive, John Holland-Kaye, warned it may ask airlines to cancel more flights if it thinks the schedules are still too ambitious and likely to add to the chaos.
“We will review the schedule changes that airlines have submitted in response to the government’s requirement to minimise disruption for passengers this summer and will ask them to take further action if necessary,” he said. “We want everyone who is travelling through Heathrow to be confident that they will have a safe and reliable journey.”
Airports’ troubles in matching the recovery have been caused in part by their inability to hire enough staff, after deep pay and job cuts by airports and airlines during the pandemic. British Airways last week restored pay for its check-in staff at Heathrow to pre-pandemic levels, averting the threat of strike action that would have added to the disruption.
Despite preparing for the recovery since November, Heathrow said on Monday that it would not match pre-pandemic staffing levels until “the end of July”, suggesting there could be several more weeks of disruption ahead.
The chaos at airports has prompted a blame game in the aviation industry. Willie Walsh, the former boss of British Airways who now leads the International Air Transport Association, a lobby group, on Sunday criticised Heathrow directly for failing to prepare for the recovery.
“Heathrow definitely should have prepared better,” Walsh said in an interview with the BBC. “They were arguing that airlines should be operating at least 80% of their slots through the summer period. They clearly did not provide sufficient resources to deal with that level of activity, so you would have to be critical of Heathrow.”
Philipp Joeinig, the chief executive of Menzies Aviation, which provides check-in services, baggage handling and refuelling for big airlines including benighted easyJet, blamed ministers and Brexit for delays in staff receiving security checks, which he said were adding to “a mounting crisis”.
He called on Monday for the government to cut back security checks and allow more workers from the EU to ease the shortages of staff, writing in the Times. He added: “Brexit had a big negative impact, reducing the available pool of employees.”
