Heathrow airport has imposed an unprecedented cap of 100,000 departing passengers each day through the summer from 12 July until 11 September 2022.
The chief executive of Britain’s biggest airport, John Holland-Kaye, says it should be achieved by airlines ceasing ticket sales on summer flights “to ensure passengers have a safe and reliable journey”.
These are the key questions and answers.
Was this a surprise?
It was to me. On two days so far this summer – 30 June and 11 July – Heathrow has ordered airlines to cut back on flights to relieve the pressure on airport systems.
This morning at 9am I assured a colleague that deeper cuts at the airport were unlikely. “My strong sense is that we will see occasional ad hoc one-day cancellations continuing on a fairly random basis,” I said. “But the scale of the BA cuts is now such that the problems are being solved through sheer lack of passengers.” British Airways has cut around one in five of its planned summer flights to and from Heathrow.
My response did not age well. Two hours later, Mr Holland-Kaye published an open letter in which he announced the 100k-per-day cap “to give better passenger journeys”.
He said: “By making this intervention now, our objective is to protect flights for the vast majority of passengers at Heathrow this summer and to give confidence that everyone who does travel through the airport will have a safe and reliable journey and arrive at their destination with their bags.
“We recognise that this will mean some summer journeys will either be moved to another day, another airport or be cancelled and we apologise to those whose travel plans are affected.
“Our colleagues are going above and beyond to get as many passengers away as possible, but we cannot put them at risk for their own safety and wellbeing.”
Why has the cap been imposed?
Tens of thousands of passengers have travelled without their baggage, partly due to temporary systems failures in Terminals 2 and 3. Many aircraft turnarounds have taken much longer than usual due to staff shortage. There have also been issues with queues for the security checkpoints.
The airport says: “We’ve recently experienced a number of challenging conditions at Heathrow that has made it difficult to maintain the quality of service for which we are world-renowned.
“We have started to see periods when service drops to a level that is not acceptable: long queue times, delays for passengers requiring assistance, bags not…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…