More than 5.4m passengers travelled through airport in January, double the 2.6m from 2022
Heathrow airport had its busiest start to the year since before the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in 2020 as travel restrictions continued to ease, according to data published on Monday.
More than 5.4 million passengers travelled through the UK’s and Europe’s busiest airport in January, double the 2.6 million from 2022, Heathrow said in a statement to the London Stock Exchange.
Continue reading...Passengers report shorter queues than usual despite Border Force strike as military brought in to help
Passengers entered Heathrow braced for the sight of queues snaking their way around the airport and departure boards coldly telling them that their festive season was ruined.
With concerns that travel problems could run into the new year as 1,000 Border Force staff began the first of eight days of strikes, those travelling through Europe’s busiest airport on the Friday before Christmas were apprehensive.
Continue reading...Royal College of Nursing says Steve Barclay refused to discuss pay at meeting on Monday; Welsh nurses to strike after last-minute talks fail. This blog is now closed
Pat Cullen, the Royal College of Nursing’s general secretary, told ITV this morning that there was no point talking to Steve Barclay, the health secretary, if he was not prepared to discuss pay. She said
What I’m saying … to the health secretary this morning, is if you don’t want to speak to me directly about nurses’ pay, we have engaged with the conciliation service Acas, they can do that through Acas, but our door is absolutely wide open and it appears at the minute that theirs is totally shut …
Fundamentally, I need to get to a table and talk to them about pay. This isn’t just me, it’s the 320,000 nurses that voted for strike action … They voted through an independent ballot that we carried out and surely to goodness you couldn’t look at one of those people this morning in the eye and say: ‘You’re not worth an extra brown penny’. In my mind they absolutely are.
I think it’s a very challenging international picture. About a third of the world’s economies are predicted to be in recession, either this year or next.
We’re no different in this country and truthfully, it is likely to get worse before it gets better, which makes it even more difficult when we have big public sector strikes going on at the moment.
Continue reading...Yellow weather warnings in place with snow and ice across country as residents of Cornwall advised not to travel
Further travel disruption is expected this week with temperatures forecast to stay well below freezing overnight, and up to 10cm of snow forecast in the south-east of England.
Met Office yellow warnings were in place from Sunday until Monday morning for northern and south-western Scotland, Northern Ireland, north-eastern England, the Midlands and south-west as well as London and the south-east.
Continue reading...Airport vows passengers will not face daily cap during biggest festive getaway in three years
Heathrow airport has said it is prepared for the biggest Christmas getaway in three years and promised that passengers will not have to face a return of the daily cap that was introduced as summer holiday travel descended into chaos.
Europe’s busiest airport, which said last month that on the busiest travel days over the festive period travellers may have to fly outside peak times to manage the festive rush, said it was working on contingency plans for potential strike action over the period.
Continue reading...Airport still has shortage of 25,000 staff and is keen to avoid disruption of summer
Heathrow has said passengers may have to fly outside peak times on some days in the run-up to Christmas to avoid further travel chaos, as Europe’s busiest airport admitted it is still short of 25,000 staff to meet high demand.
The airport, which this Sunday is due to lift the current cap of 100,000 passengers a day that was introduced in July as summer holiday travel descended into chaos, said it was in talks with airlines over the selective cap.
Continue reading...No injuries have been reported and there is no significant impact on departures or arrivals
Two aircraft have been involved in a “minor collision” on the runway at Heathrow, the airport has said.
Emergency services are at the scene but no injuries have been reported. An Icelandair plane and Korean Air aircraft are understood to have had a collision on the airfield at about 8pm on Wednesday, which is being investigated.
Continue reading...Airline group says demand is strong despite ‘historic challenges’ at Heathrow and elsewhere
British Airways has returned to profit for the first time since the start of the pandemic, with its owner International Airlines Group saying demand was strong despite “historic challenges” still facing the industry.
IAG said that there was no sign of bookings tailing off in the autumn and beyond – in the face of pessimistic forecasts from its main airport base, Heathrow – and that demand for the most lucrative transatlantic routes was continuing to grow.
Continue reading...Airport asks airlines including British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Air France to remove flights
Heathrow airport cancelled more than 60 flights on Monday and warned that it may have to ask airlines to remove more as it struggles to cope with the rebound in travel demand after the pandemic.
The flights were spread across Terminals 3 and 5, with British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Air France among the airlines affected.
Continue reading...Airline forced to scrap 200 flights due for early afternoon takeoff and delay many others as a result
Airline passengers faced fresh disruption on Thursday after an IT glitch forced easyJet to cancel about 200 flights around Europe.
The airline scrapped a stream of flights due to take off between 1pm and 3pm, affecting dozens to and from UK airports, including its biggest base at Gatwick.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Thousands of near-empty planes flown since March 2020, new figures reveal
Almost 15,000 “ghost flights” have departed from the UK, according to newly revealed official figures.
The ghost flights, defined as those with no passengers or less than 10% of passenger capacity, operated from all 32 airports listed in the data. Heathrow was top, with 4,910 ghost flights between March 2020 and September 2021. Manchester and Gatwick were the next highest. There were an average of 760 ghost flights a month over the period, although the data covered only international departure and not domestic flights.
Continue reading...Airport says passengers abandoned plans because of Omicron variant and uncertainty on restrictions
Heathrow airport has said at least 600,000 passengers cancelled their travel plans from the airport in December because of Omicron, warning aviation would take years to recover from the pandemic.
Only 19.4 million passengers passed through the airport in 2021 – less than a quarter of 2019 levels and below even 2020, the year when the Covid-19 pandemic started in March.
Continue reading...Workers in depressed sectors or regions won’t be able to plug gaps in areas that have been quicker to recover, ministers are being warned
There are signs outside almost every pub, restaurant and hotel dotting Torquay’s harbour: Staff wanted.
“It’s been packed solid busy, you can’t get a table anywhere,” said Brett Powis, owner of three hotels in the area including the Riviera and Lincombe Hall. For the hotelier, staff shortages made it harder to take full advantage of the busiest summertime boom in the Devon resort for decades.
Continue reading...Border staff left dealing with backlog of travellers as reports emerge of people fainting in three-hour queues
Delays at Heathrow airport have been described as “unacceptable” by the Home Office, af reports of passengers fainting in queues of up to three hours.
Border staff were left dealing with a huge backlog of travellers, with witnesses saying they had seen people – including a pregnant woman – passing out while queueing.
Continue reading...Airport’s plan not in the interests of consumers, says Civil Aviation Authority
Heathrow’s request to increase airport charges to recoup £2.6bn lost during the pandemic has been rejected by the UK’s aviation regulator.
The Civil Aviation Authority’s consumers and markets director, Paul Smith, described the plan as “disproportionate and not in the interests of consumers”.
Continue reading...In 2019, the body of a man fell from a passenger plane into a garden in south London. Who was he?
It was Sunday 30 June 2019, a balmy summer’s afternoon, and Wil, a 31-year-old software engineer, was lounging on an inflatable airbed outside his house in Clapham, south-west London. He wore pyjamas and drank Polish beer. As he chatted to his housemate in the sunshine, planes on their way to Heathrow airport made their final approach overhead. On his phone, Wil showed his housemate an app that tells users the route and model of any passing plane. He tested the app on one plane, and then held his phone up again, shielding his eyes from the sun and squinting into the sky.
Then he saw something falling. “At first I thought it was a bag,” he said. “But after a few seconds it turned into quite a large object, and it was falling fast.” Maybe a piece of machinery had fallen from the landing gear, he thought, or a suitcase from the cargo hold. But then he half-remembered an article he had read years before, about people stowing away on planes. He didn’t want to believe it, but as the object got nearer and nearer, it became impossible to deny. “In the last second or two of it falling, I saw limbs,” said Wil. “I was convinced that it was a human body.”
Continue reading...South African man, now known as Justin, speaks for first time of friend Carlito Vale, who died after 430-metre fall, in Channel 4 documentary
A South African man who survived an 11-hour flight from Johannesburg to London after hiding in a plane’s undercarriage has told of the last words he exchanged with a friend whose body fell from the same British Airways flight as it came in to land at Heathrow.
“He said: ‘We made it,’ and then I passed out with the lack of oxygen,” said the man, who was then known as Themba and who has spoken publicly for the first time about the desperate journey both men undertook in 2015.
Continue reading...The crisis poses a deadly threat to some sectors and creates opportunities for others. We examine how they will fare in 2021
Coronavirus has changed lives and industries across the UK, accelerating fundamental shifts in behaviour and consumption that were already on their way. Debates about home working, preserving local high streets and the ethics of air travel were bubbling away before coronavirus rampaged across the world, but the consequences of the worst pandemic in more than a century have either settled those arguments or boosted the momentum behind certain lifestyle changes. Here we look at how those debates have been changed – or resolved – by Covid-19.
Continue reading...Critics say plan for third runway runs counter to UK’s legally binding target of net zero emissions by 2050
The government faces a legal challenge over its plan to expand Heathrow airport, with lawyers and environmentalists demanding it review its policy in line with its commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050.
The Good Law Project, a not-for-profit organisation with a focus on public interest cases including environmentalism and tackling poverty, argues that the government must update its plan for a third runway to take into account the emissions pledge it made following the approval for the airport expansion in June 2018.
Continue reading...Travel industry pins hopes for an end to 14-day isolation on new two-stage testing scheme at airport, with results delivered in hours
A new Covid test centre is ready to start rapid testing of inbound passengers arriving at Heathrow airport’s Terminal 2, as soon as the government gives it the go-ahead. Arrivals would find out results within 24 hours of being tested, replacing the need for a 14-day quarantine.
More than 13,000 passenger tests a day can be carried out in the facility, launched by aviation services firm Swissport and the Collinson Group, which runs airport lounges. A second test centre will be ready at Terminal 5 by the end of August, and operators say both centres are scalable according to demand.
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