It was a nightmare for passengers flying through Canada’s busiest airport, with long queues, delays and cancellations becoming the norm, and aviation experts predict that these problems will only get worse before they improve.
Duncan Dee, former chief operating officer of Air Canada, says much of the delay is due to staffing levels at customs and immigration offices at Toronto Pearson International Airport, poorly equipped to deal with rising passenger traffic and COVID border measures. -19, creating a domino effect from delays.
“Each of the passengers is being screened. And now it is taking four times longer than before the pandemic, “he told CTV News on Wednesday.
Before the pandemic, it took 30 to 60 seconds to check a passenger for customs and immigration. Today, Dee says the process takes four to five minutes, thanks in large part to screening issues related to COVID-19 through the ArriveCAN app and the verification of vaccine certificates.
“You have quadrupled the time they need to process each passenger. So unless you quadruple the number of people doing the processing, you will have a delay, “he said.
Travelers unfamiliar with the ArriveCAN system may not have filled in the application form correctly. They may have evidence of vaccination that is not in English or French, or the type of vaccine may not be available in Canada, such as the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. Some travelers may even be randomly selected for to pass the COVID-19 test on arrival.
All of this adds another “level of complexity” to Canadian Border Service (CBSA) staff, Dee said.
“CBSA employees are some of the best around. “These people are doing a really great job and they are usually working extremely fast, but you have put them in a position where they are trying to impose mandates that are completely impossible to carry out in the time period they have,” he said.
Delays and long queues in the customs hall, in turn, create a knockdown effect, which creates more delays for incoming international passengers who have not disembarked. Dee says that in order to avoid overcrowding at the terminal, arriving planes will be instructed by air traffic control to wait on the runway until part of the accumulation of the customs line is cleared.
And even when passengers start to disembark, they can only allow 10 to 50 passengers to disembark for half an hour at a time to avoid a collision at the terminal.
“If you have 250 people on the plane, with 50 every half hour, you suddenly count another hour and a half before everyone gets off the plane. But this is not even the end. They reach the customs and they are in a two-hour queue before they even see an officer, “Dee explained.
“It’s all coming together… and there are six and a half hours left before they get in a taxi or go home and it’s just not sustainable.”
EXPECTED AIRPORTS UNTIL SEPTEMBER
With more passengers expected in July and August, Dee says Pearson’s problems will only get worse.
“It’s just a mathematical equation. There are 22 to 24 percent more passengers in July and August than in May and April, and there were trains in May and April. “You can only imagine what happens when there are even more passengers in July and August,” he said.
But the problems at Pearson are not just a Canadian problem. As Transport Minister Omar Algabra pointed out, many European airports are also struggling with delays and long queues, sometimes extending beyond the terminal.
In an effort to address these delays, Algabra said the federal government was hiring 400 new staff to screen CATSA and was looking to make “more adjustments” to COVID-19’s travel rules. But McGill University aviation expert John Gradek says much of the blame lies with the airlines, not CATSA or CBSA.
“The main reason is that there are too many passengers coming in and out of airports than the capacity the airport can take,” Gradek told CTV News on Wednesday.
Some European airports, such as Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and London’s Heathrow, have asked airlines to reduce flights and limit the number of passengers to avoid overcrowding. Gradek believes such requests should be made to Canadian airlines.
“Airlines are hungry for money. They are hungry for revenue. So, they will come together with their schedules. They will want to have more and more passengers on their planes, to generate more revenue,” he said. “Someone needs to step up and essentially say ‘X percent of your flights, you need to reduce.’
Both Gradek and Dee expect delays to hit Pearson and other airports around the world by September, following the end of the summer travel season.
“Airlines have not yet seen the best number of passengers. Airports have not yet seen the worst of their delays,” Gradek said.
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