Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I am lucky enough to be at London Paddington Station. It's an absolutely beautiful day. The sun is filtering down through Brunel's magnificent station roof and trains seem to be running as normal.

Lots of people in holiday mood, which is great to see.

However, I have been fielding questions all morning about the Heathrow strikes.

And of course, Paddington is the starting point for the Heathrow Express

and indeed a calling point for the excellent Elizabeth line. So I want to address what may or may

not happen. I am particularly concerned to have seen an industry observer come out and say, what does this mean, to be

completely honest, chaos. I don't think that the strike by 2,000 or more security staff

at Heathrow will result in chaos. And I'd like to tell you why. First of all, if you're flying on Air France,

KLM, Qatar Airways, on any of the Star Alliance carriers such as United Singapore Airlines,

if you're flying on Air Lingus to Dublin, you are going to be using Terminal 2 or Terminal 4 and therefore you will not be affected at all.

Next, there will be mitigations in place and let me tell you what they are.

You might well and I think it's perfectly reasonable think, hang on, 2,000 staff taking themselves out of the security search area at the time

when Heathrow is at absolute maximum pressure, the busiest it's been since 2019.

That is obviously a recipe for, well, that aforesaid term, chaos.

But I don't think it is.

Let me tell you what the airport is likely to do.

First of all, they will be getting lots of extra staff in, and this could be me.

I know that you may recall, I've reminded you that I used to frisk

people at Gatwick airport well that was a job not a hobby well that was in the 20th century I think

I would need some serious retraining if I were to want to do the same thing at Heathrow Airport and so they won't be hiring me for that.

However, they will be putting lots of extra staff and this will include management staff

in purple polo shirts and they will be effectively saying to as many passengers as possible before the security search area,

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