October 28th - What Heathrow’s capacity controls could mean
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 October 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The final podcast of the week is brought to you from King’s Creek Station in Australia's Northern Territory. But I’m not talking about Australia - except in the context of how to get to and from there over Christmas since Heathrow Airport announced it will lift the passenger cap this weekend.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder coming to you from |
| 0:08.4 | Kings Creek Station in Australia's northern territory pretty much the back end of beyond |
| 0:15.8 | 75 miles or so as the crow flies to Uluru the the great rock at the heart of the red centre. |
| 0:24.3 | But I'm not actually talking about Australia except in the sense of getting there at Christmas |
| 0:30.9 | because I've had a lot of people getting in touch concerned about what Heathrow is saying about possibly adjusting, maybe even |
| 0:41.9 | cancelling some flights. Just a reminder of where we are with Heathrow. Britain's busiest airport |
| 0:48.7 | by a fairly long chalk and over the summer because there were stresses and strains particularly on ground handling |
| 0:57.6 | the airport imposed an unprecedented cap of 100,000 departing passengers per day. That meant people who |
| 1:05.2 | were already booked on flights suddenly found those flights were cancelled. They were having to be |
| 1:09.3 | rescheduled. They couldn't be rescheduled from Heathrow on the same day it all got very very messy and that was on top of the |
| 1:16.6 | tens of thousands of flights that British Airways has been canceling through the summer |
| 1:21.6 | because it well frankly over-promised and could not deliver them. Now Heathrow confirmed that it is |
| 1:32.6 | lifting that 100,000 passenger departure cap at 2 o'clock in the morning on Sunday. That's when |
| 1:40.6 | the clocks go back and that's traditionally when you get the change of the seasons |
| 1:48.7 | and the start of Windsor and low demand generally but that's not quite what is happening over |
| 1:57.0 | Christmas which is an incredibly busy time. And I'm looking at a statement from Heathrow, |
| 2:05.6 | and I've had a chat with the chief executive, John Holland K, as well, about what they are proposing. |
| 2:11.1 | And effectively, the idea is, and I'll just quote the exact words, a highly targeted mechanism |
| 2:16.9 | that, if needed, would align supply and words, a highly targeted mechanism that if needed would |
| 2:18.0 | align supply and demand on a small number of peak days in the lead up to Christmas. |
| 2:23.4 | What would those days be? |
| 2:25.3 | Well, I think you're kind of looking at anything from about the 16th of December through to probably the 23rd. |
... |
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