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Leeds Live
Leeds Live
National
Jaimie Kay

Leeds Bradford Airport chaos as huge queues cause woman to miss two flights on same day

A woman missed not one but two flights at Leeds Bradford Airport as huge queues through security prevented her from making both flights.

Another passenger said security was taking more than three hours to get through on Saturday, with huge queues snaking around the building and even the security FastTrack queue hit with delays.

Dave Allan tweeted: "Queues are in excess of three hours and snaking around the building!" He shared a picture of the airport on Saturday morning.

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Hannah Hughes a travel agent for Hays Travel posted another image on Facebook showing similar queues. The photo shows a lot of people outside the airport's main entrance, with cars and families lined up with their luggage.

Hannah took her friend, Chantel Bendelow, from Northallerton, to the airport for her flight on Saturday but due to the length of the queue, she missed it. She was then moved onto the next flight with Ryanair but missed that one too. She finally got onto a new flight but not until the following Sunday.

Hannah said: “I am a travel agent, so I booked my friend a holiday and gave her a lift to the airport and when I got up there, I just could not believe it. I’ve never seen Leeds like that ever, my mate actually missed her first flight due to the queues, that was with Ryanair.

There were no queues on the Sunday (Hannah Hughes)

“I said to the desk, she will miss her flight if she has to wait that long and she did, so she had to pay for another flight, Ryanair didn’t give her anything back.”

Hannah said at one point, the FastTrack queue, meant for quicker travel, was taking longer than going through a normal gate. This was down to only one security gate being open at the time.

Leeds Bradford apologised last week due to problems involving recruitment and training. They also said that the speed of the withdrawal of travel restrictions led to a rapid number of people going on holiday.

In a statement, the airport said: "Unfortunately, these current challenges are an industry-wide problem, caused by the speed of withdrawal of travel restrictions and testing which has led to the rapid recovery of international travel."

When Chantel returned on Sunday for her rescheduled flight, there were no queues at the airport.

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