March 9th - Gatwick
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 9 March 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gatwick airport, located in picturesque West Sussex, is ordinarily the UK's second busiest airport with flights to hundreds of destinations worldwide. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has left Gatwick struggling to control huge losses, of £1 million a day in 2021, as well as an 84% drop in passenger numbers compared to 2019.
Now, Gatwick is getting ready to restart a reduced short-haul programme, of about half of its previous scale, for the Summer season. This is due to the government's "Living With COVID" plan, which ended all remaining travel restrictions in England and Northern Ireland earlier this year and will be extended to Scotland and Wales by the end of March. Jumping on the chance for recovery, Gatwick will be reopening its South Terminal on 27th March, and even has plans to bring into use a standby runway.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape or away and having the time of your life. |
| 0:15.5 | Today, I'm going to talk about the airport for which I feel more emotionally attached than any other. |
| 0:25.6 | And that is Gatwick. |
| 0:27.6 | Yes, the second airport of the UK, or at least it used to be, |
| 0:33.5 | about 30 miles south of London just inside Sussex. |
| 0:38.3 | And the reason I'm particularly attached to it is because, well, I was born there almost, |
| 0:43.9 | a mile and a bit south of the runway. |
| 0:48.0 | And I've also worked there in many capacities. |
| 0:54.0 | I was working, cleaning out the offices for British |
| 0:58.1 | Airways and later I frisked people. That was a job, not a hobby. And so I've always been |
| 1:06.0 | keen to follow it and also I find it a pretty good airport to use given its remarkable size. Bear in mind |
| 1:15.3 | that in 2019 it was by far the biggest, busiest single runway airport in the world with 46.6 million |
| 1:26.6 | people flying in and out extracting an extraordinary amount of capacity from that single runway. |
| 1:35.0 | Everything has gone horribly wrong since then, and I reckon that Gatwick, if you take maybe the top 20 European airports, |
| 1:47.3 | Gatwick has been far, far more seriously hit than any other. Passenger numbers down 84 and a bit percent in 2021 compared with |
| 1:56.8 | 2019. Effectively, just five out of six passengers simply disappeared or didn't make those journeys. |
| 2:06.6 | However, the airline managed to reduce its losses to just a million pounds a day during |
| 2:13.2 | 2021, which you might think is quite a lot, but it's actually about sort of a quarter better than it |
| 2:19.6 | was in the previous year. And they've partly done that by mothballing South Terminal, which is the |
| 2:27.1 | bigger terminal and making everybody fly in and out of the North terminal, because clearly you just |
| 2:33.5 | need one lot of security staff, |
| 2:36.3 | one lot of people running duty-free and so on. But Gatwick's South Terminal is going to reopen |
... |
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