September 26th - Gatwick Grounds Flights: The Impact of Staff Shortage
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 26 September 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With 30% of Gatwick's air-traffic controllers falling ill, we're seeing unprecedented disruptions. In this episode, I'll walk you through the emerging cancellations, unexpected diversions, and what you as a passenger need to know.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast for Tuesday the 26th of September. |
| 0:09.6 | The number of things that can affect your journey seem to be beyond measure. I say that because |
| 0:17.3 | I was looking yesterday at the very widespread cancellations that were happening at |
| 0:22.8 | Gatwick Airport and thinking, well, my goodness, this is extraordinary. It was due to the high |
| 0:30.1 | level of staff sickness at the control tower. Now, let's say there's about 30 people who work in the control tower at Gatwick |
| 0:40.5 | air traffic controllers, extraordinarily professional women and men who have the job of looking after |
| 0:47.8 | the world's busiest runway and getting more capacity out of that in terms of departures and arrivals than any other. |
| 0:58.7 | Now, very unfortunately, there are high levels of sickness among them. |
| 1:04.0 | About 30% of the staff who would be working there are off sick. |
| 1:10.2 | Some of them with COVID. |
| 1:12.6 | As a result of that, well, we've been seeing over the past few days just a large number of cancellations and delays and diversions. |
| 1:22.6 | And that's been happening because the flow rate, which is the number of flights that can be safely got in and out of the airport, |
| 1:31.8 | has been reduced as the number of staff available to handle those planes is reduced as well. |
| 1:40.7 | And as a result of that, Gatwick Airport has made the unprecedented decision to order airlines to cancel dozens of flights over the next six days. |
| 1:53.8 | Basically, they are saying, we do not believe, and they've talked to, Nats, the air traffic control provider here, we don't believe that |
| 2:03.3 | the airport can handle more than 600 flights a day. Now, that's fine, for example, on Tuesday, |
| 2:10.8 | the 26th, it's fine on Saturday the 30th of September because those dates only have 800 flights in. But over the next few days |
| 2:23.2 | on Wednesday, the 27th, Thursday the 28th, Friday the 29th and Saturday the 1st of October, |
| 2:28.5 | there will be dozens of cancellations on each day. The total 164 movements, assuming about 150 people per flight, |
| 2:41.0 | that's 25,000 people who will learn shortly that their flights have been cancelled. |
| 2:48.0 | Now, the worst effect is going to be on EasyJet because they've got by far the largest |
| 2:54.0 | share of flights at Gatwick. When there's cancellations generally, they have far more than any other |
... |
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