Hello, I'm Simon Corder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling.

Or, in the case of about 5,000 people at Heathrow this morning where I've been not travelling.

They are the people who are on the 30 flights that Heathrow mandated should be cancelled on Thursday

morning between 6am and 1230pm and the reason is well the airport says we think that to keep people

safe we need to reduce this number.

I've been talking to them and they said that we will have 13% more passengers on today

than we did last Thursday and we need to be able to cope with that.

And at the moment, the only way we can do that is by insisting that

airlines cancel flights. And cancel they have. About half of the 30 or so flights, which in itself

is about one in 40 of the total flights, if you see what I mean, are from British Airways and they are on top

of the 100 plus daily departures that are cancelled generally with several weeks notice. It also, though,

affects a Virgin Atlantic which cancelled a trip to New York, JFK,

and all the usual suspects, Air Lingus to Dublin, Air France to Paris, K&M to Amsterdam,

a Luftansett to Frank Verde and Zurich. You probably know the form.

What's interesting, though, is the way that Virgin Atlantic responded. Clearly, when these things

happen, I've been talking to the airlines as well as the airport. And the airport basically is saying

we've really got to have resilience and it's important that the airlines

have everything that they need in place in order to cope with the demand.

So resourcing levels, they say, are at their limit And if you've got last minute increases,

that really makes things difficult.

Now, that I interpreted as being a something that was affecting the airlines.

But then when I got on to Virgin Atlantic, I got a slightly different response back.

...