jeremyBA

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/h...hird-6q5cbfhd0

given ba is the largest carrier at Heathrow I assume this is going to have a significant impact.

I wonder how this will play out ? The restrictions seem time of day specific bit if you only have one flight a day to many destinations and if they depart in the restricted period ….

good to see the U.K. is prospering and open for business.

the mess is getting worse not better.

I am currently sitting on an easyJet flight from Palma. The 10:45 is cancelled. The next flight to the U.K. is Wednesday - so a lot of stuck people and of course is it not just one flight being cancelled at nil notice.

DYKWIA

Please don't post links to paywalled content.

jeremyBA

Apologies. I have no subscriptions to anything so I don’t know why you could not click it as I could.

lorcancoyle

The relevant snippet from the Times - that’s 6-8 short haul flights an hour, for 13 hours?

Bohinjska Bistrica

This is about as much as I can get out of it. I am not a subscriber.

Seems to be only The Times carrying this story at the moment.

xarantine

“We’re ready for travel to resume, please please Mr Government drop those restrictions”

…

🙃

Maybe try paying staff a decent wage and you’ll attract more applicants.

sigma421

Another key bit

“The curbs, which started to come into force last month, will apply to all airlines using Heathrow, with details to be decided by the Heathrow slot committee.Flights will be withdrawn, and the cut in capacity is also likely to push up prices, deterring some passengers from making new bookings.”

So this isn’t necessarily new.

SW7London

I wonder who/what made Heathrow do this given the safety considerations, unlike Heathrow to voluntarily give up revenue

If I was an airline which spent $$ millions on certain slots I'd be pretty annoyed to be told I cant use them!

Genius1

Airlines are partly to blame given lack of their own (or their handlers') resource for check-in and other ground activities. Heathrow is also partly to blame given lack of security staff, as is the Government when it comes to immigration and Border Force staff.

It's a mix of resource constraints across different parties that coupled with demand would create unsafe overcrowding in check-in, security and immigration (to varying degrees depending on the terminal, time of day and date).

TedToToe

They will argue, and rightly so, that a significant constraint has been put on the labour market. Of course, offering a higher wage will attract more applicants but how would this play out in the wider economy? I'm no economist but, would we not be heading for stagflation?
So, perhaps, restricting capacity in the short term is the least worst option.

SW7London

Without turning into OMNI, any European labour pre Brexit had/has the right to stay in the UK so why is Brexit suddenly the issue for airport/airline staffing?

Heathrow/airlines I doubt are worried about stagflation, if they were willing to offer a higher wage they would do so if it directly benefits them rather than being a good economic citizen and worrying about any minor economic impacts their individual decision(s) may have on the economy as a whole

(although seems they would rather lobby the government for cheaper labour as per Ryanair's comments last week)

Dublin and Sydney have airport issues due to labour shortages, and various American carriers too are encountering issues with shortage of labour so I think the industry as a whole needs a good look at the proposition its offering employees post pandemic. Shift work and & anti social hours, low wages and dealing with the public aren't generally attractive characteristics!

Bohinjska Bistrica

The largest underlying reason for this is that they laid off too many employees,

Many of those employees will have found other jobs and might well be happier without the downsides of working in an airport, especially the unsociable hours. Many of them probably have no intention of going back to an industry that dropped them whilst government support was available; something that is no doubt weighing on minds of potential new recruits as well. And yes, some will have left the country.

Once again, their boasts of 'we are ready, drop the restrictions' ring hollow. What a mess.

13901

HAL has cut, as others have said, in a very strong way. The Romans had the idea of decimation, where they killed one every 10 people; HAL has more than decimated (as in firing rather than killing, obviously) the ranks of their security and engineering staff. The result is that now they are critically short of people to process passengers and to maintain key parts of the infrastructure.

Brexit plays a big part because a large % of the security and engineering workers were Poles or however Central Europeans. Many have left, either for home or elsewhere, and they can’t be bothered to return. Either they get a good enough wage home, or they’ve been disgusted by the way HAL treated them (I know a couple guys who have been treated very poorly) or, well, have had enough of the ‘hostile environment’.

Now HAL is really struggling to hire; on one side (engineering) the skills are in low supply. On the other (security) the native population just isn’t interested, or doesn’t stay in the job long enough… then there’s the obvious bottleneck of vetting, training and providing passes to those who join. I described in another thread how shambolic the airside pass renewal system was over at HAL in 2018; if I remember properly the lead time was something like 4-5 weeks there. Now… who knows.

I have very little sympathy for the airlines for the mess they’re in, I have even less sympathy for HMG because they contributed (through Brexit and through a very confused C19 policy) to the mess, but I have ZERO sympathy for HAL. They have created their own mess by being historically focussed at giving out dividends rather than running an airport. They went for the short term benefit of cutting staff with not so much as a thought about the next steps (I heard they even culled a lot of people in their pass issuing team, though I can’t verify it), they had the sheer audacity of asking for way-above-average increases to the world’s highest fees and now they’re doing this. Their only saving grace is that they’re the airport people want to fly to and that other hubs in Europe are being even worse than them. Well at least one of them is (AMS).

TedToToe

Presumably, this means HAL don’t have enough staff to reopen T4.

SW7London

Great post 13901. Appears HAL shouldn't have treated their staff so poorly, they now need to "pay the cost" so to be speak of offering greater incentives to work for them in a much more competitive labour market.

Still, I'm sure their management is compensated well ensuring they can "attract top talent" at the exec level so I'm surprised they cant seem to manage this!

Agree airlines have bought this on themselves by focusing on investors rather than customers and staff over recent years. WW and AC have been shown to be poor stewards of the airline given the challenges SD has inherited.

One thing I cant work out is the UK Government - why didnt they streamline things like background checks prior to removing travel restrictions? They knew what position they were in so this at least could have mitigated the issues somewhat. (and why didnt the airports/airlines shout about this when it was obvious the Gov wasnt preparing itself?)

One common theme here is management and leadership has been found woefully inadequate across the industry. Its not hard to manage things when economies are booming, actually having to make difficult decisions and get them right most of the time is what they are paid for and they dont appear to have this skillset.