After weeks of last-minute cancellations to and from London Gatwick airport, easyJet has pre-emptively axed 1,700 further departures over the summer.
Britain’s biggest budget airline has taken the drastic action in a bid to get its schedule back on track and to reduce the number of flights that get cancelled while passengers are waiting at the gate.
Most of the notifications, affecting 180,000 passengers, went out over the weekend of 8–9 July. Over the same weekend, easyJet once again grounded dozens of Gatwick flights at short notice.
The aim of the schedule cull is to increase resilience. The airline blames severe air-traffic control (ATC) congestion across Europe for its problems.
Most passengers have been notified and rebooked on other easyJet flights, but around 9,000 passengers may have to find seats on other airlines.
These are the key questions – and answers.
What’s the problem?
As easyJet passengers hoping to fly from Gatwick to Belfast and from Budapest to the Sussex airport found out late on Sunday night, the airline has been struggling to maintaining the promised schedule at its biggest base this summer. Both flights were cancelled while passengers were waiting “airside”.
Typically delays build up during the day, with flight crew eventually going “out of hours” and being legally unable to complete the trip. That sequence of events has been repeated hundreds of times in the past few weeks on easyJet flights to and from Gatwick.
The carrier squarely blames “unprecedented” air traffic control delays, which it says are three times longer than before the pandemic.
As The Independent has reported, the pan-European air traffic management body, Eurocontrol, is warning of high overload at a number of area control centres during the peak summer months.
The challenges are intensified by the war in Ukraine, which has closed a large amount of airspace in eastern Europe and increased pressure on routes across the Balkans, and to and from Turkey. To complicate an already difficult picture, some air traffic control strikes are threatened.
In addition, Gatwick is the busiest single-runway airport in the world. With little slack in the system, arrival and departure delays can swiftly increase.
Do other airlines at Gatwick have the same issue?
No. Over the past weekend, for example, easyJet made about five times more cancellations…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…