What went wrong at Heathrow? The airport, which confidently laid out expansion plans and charged customers a hefty premium, has repeatedly suffered the kind of chaos people pay money to avoid: flight cancellations, long lines, mountains of lost luggage and threats of strikes. Now, at the start of the full summer peak, he has told airlines to turn passengers back.
In a week when baking temperatures swept across Britain, few places felt the heat more. Heathrow’s own posters highlighting the “elephant in the room” – aviation’s contribution to climate change – have never seemed more relevant as the mercury reached a record 40.2C at the airport and the grass between its runways was parched to a desert brown.
Last week, Heathrow announced a limit of 100,000 passengers a day until September 11, angering airlines and putting the plans of thousands of customers in jeopardy. The airport insisted it was “protecting holidays” but the backlash was furious. Emirates initially flatly refused to comply or cancel flights. In some of the milder insults, Willie Walsh, the director-general of Iata – and an old management foe of British Airways and its parent group IAG – described Heathrow as “a bunch of idiots when it comes to airport management”.
Disturbing storm clouds from travelers
Inside the airport terminals this week, the line between extremely busy and frantic was thin. But at least the air conditioner was working. In the late morning lull of Terminal 5, it didn’t look like chaos. “Give it a few hours,” said a BA employee at the tail ropes, grinning, a little sweaty. “It just comes and goes… Just random.”
The turmoil in the airline industry is self-perpetuating: huge queues are growing with anxious passengers showing up ever earlier for flights. Wider travel disruption doesn’t help: Set up with a laptop and luggage in Preth, one seasoned traveler said he arrived nine hours before his flight to Australia, after warnings the heat could stop the trains he needs to the airport.
Adjacent Terminal 2 is Heathrow’s most modern addition – opened in 2014 with the optimistic aim of getting passengers to and from planes in minutes, without the traditional check-in lanes. Now, however, a man in a suit was patiently explaining over and over to customers that even though they were checking in online, they still had to enter the daunting United Airlines line to comply with US security procedures.
All around, various staff – in airline livery, high-vis vests or pink ‘Heathrow helper’ polo shirts – line up the arriving groups, which appear and disperse like the rumble of storm clouds.
Post-Covid restrictions, as corporate travel declines, fewer and fewer travelers are likely to be mobile, unencumbered and tech-savvy frequent flyers. Many of them don’t speak English and have a lot of baggage; old, young, infirm, faced with confusing layouts, prompts for QR codes and additional Covid documentation and needing help of all kinds.
And if the terminals can seem chaotic, the worst problems are in the take-off and landing area. Delays today are relatively small, but the arrivals board now has an additional function besides the landing time of the flight: whether his bags have been delivered or are arriving. While the BA flight from Kuwait landed more than 90 minutes ago, the bags still haven’t reached the carousels.
So reducing passenger numbers by just a few thousand could make a huge difference to those who travel anyway, according to Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye, defiant at Terminal 5 on Tuesday, amid growing speculation about its future. “We are taking action with the restriction to protect people’s holidays. We have 100,000 passengers traveling today, it’s the hottest day we’ve ever had and the airport is running smoothly. It shows that the actions we take in difficult circumstances work.
Finger pointing
Holland-Kay said no one wanted a “blame game” but said the main factor was the lack of airline ground handling staff, either on contract – to companies such as Menzies, Swissport or Cobalt – or directly employed. The main effect of the cap will be to limit further ticket sales, but around 1,500 passengers on the busiest summer days will be forced to change their plans, on top of the hundreds of thousands already affected by BA’s mass cancellations. ordered earlier this summer.
“The reality is that if the airport, airlines or ground operators don’t have enough capacity, people won’t get off their flights in a much worse way: their flights are canceled after they’ve checked in, maybe even on the plane,” said Holland-Kay. “It’s the worst of all worlds.”
Labor shortages are exacerbated by lengthy background checks for new hires and competition from other sectors.
Surprisingly few things actually fall under the airport’s direct purview, except for security and infrastructure staff. Airlines conduct check-in. The immigration hall, scene of huge queues in previous years, is the responsibility of the Home Office and its Border Force officers. Although the automated baggage systems are (usually) maintained by Heathrow, the operators who load or unload the bags are employed or contracted by the airlines.
Even the people on the runway who drive trucks to bring in baggage, attach air bridges, or push planes off the stand are direct or external airline personnel.
“Excessive” shareholder returns
Airlines, however, point to multiple failings at Heathrow: a lack of security staff, which saw long queues at Easter; the unreliable baggage system; and a pre-cap planning failure brought in at the 11th hour. As Holland-Kay himself said, there are 400 separate companies operating at the airport and his role is “to keep them all working in tandem”.
While airlines such as BA have agreed and cut more and more flights from their schedules to keep the numbers rolling, the latest standoff has played out amid a bitter dispute over landing fees. Heathrow has offered to double the price set by Britain’s regulator that airlines can pay per passenger.
That has sparked a furious backlash from the carriers, which have suffered huge losses and are questioning whether Heathrow’s shareholders – mainly Qatar and other sovereign wealth funds – should dig deeper after taking £4bn in dividends over the past decade.
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Heathrow’s ever-increasing debt, up to £15.4 billion at the last count, has funded investment that directly boosts returns as more is built, according to the regulatory system. The airlines believe they enjoy an enviably stable position – or as Virgin Atlantic’s chief executive, Shai Weiss, put it: “Abusing its monopoly position to extract passengers and deliver excessive returns to shareholders”.
At the Farnborough Air Show this week, Walsh said Heathrow was unprepared for the strength of the recovery because of its own pessimistic forecast, which he said was to “play” the regulator to allow it to raise landing charges. While airlines had seen a recovery in pent-up demand, Heathrow downplayed it. Holland-Kaye rejects the charge, saying airlines should have hired more operators sooner if they expected a recovery.
The blame game seems to have a way of going – and so do the issues. Holland-Kaye says it will take 12-18 months to resolve the staffing issues. The cap may not be lifted for half term or Christmas, he hinted: “They’ve got about 70% of staff trying to serve about 80-85% of passengers and it’s not working.”
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