UK (Commonwealth Union)_ Gatwick Airport, a key hub for traffic to and from Ireland restricts flight numbers for week amid air traffic control problems.
The Airport will share 164 cancellations until Sunday between airlines, as it seeks to avoid diversions.
Gatwick imposed an immediate cap on Monday of 800 flights landing or taking off a day. The airport said it would proportionately share the total of 164 cancellations between airlines until Sunday, with easyJet passengers being the most likely to be affected given that just under half of all Gatwick flights are operated by the carrier.
Thousands of passengers flying this week to and from Gatwick will have their flights cancelled after the airport announced a cap on movements owing to a shortage of staff in air traffic control.
Those who will be travelling on Friday are most likely to be hit, with 865 flights scheduled to depart. The airlines and the airport are expected to announce cuts on Tuesday.
According to its website, Aer Lingus operates about five flights per day from Dublin to Gatwick.
Gatwick said the move was to reduce chaos and on-the-day cancellations and allow more passengers to be rebooked in advance. Short-notice staff absences in the air traffic control team have resulted in dozens of flights being delayed, cancelled, or rerouted in recent weeks.
The West Sussex airport was forced to apologize to thousands of travellers whose flight plans were thrown into chaos after more than 40 flights were affected by staff absences.
About 30 per cent of those at working for Nats which is contracted to provide air traffic control services at the airport, at Gatwick, are understood to be sick or unable to perform full duties.
Gatwick’s chief executive, Stewart Wingate, said he had received repeated assurances from Nats after temporary air traffic control restrictions were put in place at the airport earlier this month, but that the situation was not improving.
He said that although it was a difficult decision to take, Gatwick was trying to give that certainty to airlines and passengers.
A Nats spokesperson said that given the levels of sickness they have experienced over the last few weeks, they believed that the responsible thing to do was to limit the number of flights this week so as to reduce the risk of daily disruption to passengers using the airport.
Nats added that although it was training and recruiting as fast as possible, even an experienced air traffic controller takes at least 9 months to qualify at Gatwick, and very few are able to do so, since Gatwick was such a busy and complex air traffic environment.
The chief executive of easyJet, Johan Lundgren, said that while it was regrettable that a temporary limit on capacity at Gatwick airport was required, they believed it was the right action by the airport so on-the-day cancellations and delays could be avoided.
He said that Gatwick airport and Nats now need to work on a longer-term plan so the resilience of air traffic control is improved at Gatwick, and fit for purpose. Our call for a more wide-ranging review of Nats remains so the broader issues could be examined so it could deliver robust services to passengers now and in the future.
Michael O’Leary, the outspoken Ryanair chief executive, called on the boss of Nats, Martin Rolfe, to resign over a “blatant failure to adequately staff UK air traffic control” following the disruption earlier this month.
Wingate said that they must deliver on the commitment that they made when they were given the contract, mainly for the good of the airlines, and most importantly for passengers.
Heathrow airport introduced a daily limit of 100,000 passengers last summer, as it struggled to cope with the post-pandemic increase in travel, with airlines cancelling thousands of flights and travellers who had to face long queue times amid shortages of ground staff.
The airport kept the daily limit in place from July till the end of October while it sought to hire and train tens of thousands of staff.
