With six weeks to save summer, can easyJet climb out of the chaos? | Airline industry

On the tarmac at Gatwick at the start of half-term, thousands of miles from the Cyprus seaside destination where their plane should have already landed, a cry that spoke for countless passengers filled the cabin: “I don’t need this … It’s out of my control, completely out of my control.”

The cry came, worryingly, not from a passenger but from the pilot of the Wizz Air plane, and was captured on a TikTok video that went viral. Now, with chaos gripping the industry, airline and airport chiefs seem to be floundering victims of circumstance just as much passengers and pilots. So where do the problems lie – and will they be fixed in time for summer?

Looking back on their situation two years ago, airlines might welcome the current turbulence: back then, with coronavirus sweeping the world, most had not flown a passenger for months. More aviation businesses were tipped for demise than for a swift recovery. Even in early 2022, much leisure travel was ruled out by the Omicron variant.

But demand for holidays and flights has boomed: airlines are back to about 85% of 2019 flight capacity around Europe. However, an industry that lost many of its staff – thousands made redundant, others lured to other sectors, some gone after Brexit – has yet to fully replace them.

Discussions over where the fault lies have animated government and industry meetings. Were furlough schemes generous enough? Were travel restrictions scrapped too suddenly? Were aviation businesses too slow to respond?

Passengers tend to blame the airline they booked with – and much of this blame has fallen on easyJet. Britain’s biggest carrier cancelled hundreds of flights, many just before departure, upending the plans of tens of thousands of passengers – again. A withering letter from the French pilots’ union accused managers in Luton of presiding over “unprecedented chaos” – cancelling viable flights and waiting too long to scrap others.

EasyJet can blame external factors – chaos at Schiphol in Amsterdam, air traffic control issues, even freak weather – but competitor Ryanair, which is operating more flights now than in 2019, has flown on. Like British Airways, easyJet has also suffered the self-inflicted mayhem of a huge IT failure.

BA, though, chose to chop hard and early, cancelling many summer flights after a dire Easter rather than risk more last-minute failures. EasyJet has not yet…