Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Friday the 23rd of May.

As June, July, August and September, the peak months for aviation in Europe,

get closer, who on earth would want to run an airline?

The problems that are facing carriers across the continent

are legion, everything from air traffic control staff shortages to summer storms.

But one person who's perfectly happy to is Kenton Jarvis. He is the chief executive

of EasyJet Britain's biggest budget airline, and I've been catching

up with him about what he is expecting in terms of possible disruption in Europe and what he's

doing about it.

The performance from Air Traffic Control over the first six, seven months has been reassuringly

core. The French of probably the worst as months, has been reassuringly poor. The French

of probably the worst as usual, with Germany and the Greeks competing for a second and third

spot on the deterioration in service. But this is something we anticipated. We've got better tools,

so we've become more sophisticated in our use of the simulation tool that we call SkySim,

and that allows us to put the schedule in, put the number of delay minutes we anticipate, which is a bad summer and then see how it

forms and address the pinch points. We're really sharpening our turn times again. The time between

when the aircraft pulls up to the gate and when it leaves again.

Might be harsh to say we lost a bit of focus on this, but we're seeing good results from refocusing on it.

And we've put turn cards in with all our crew.

We've done a big education on the importance of it.

If we're going to have difficult air traffic control delays, then our ability to recover them with sharper turn times is important.

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