by Emirates has rejected an order from Heathrow to cancel flights to meet a limit on the number of passengers.
The airline accused the West London airport of showing “blatant disregard for consumers” by trying to force it to “deny seats to tens of thousands of travellers”.
Virgin Atlantic also criticized Heathrow’s actions and claimed that it was responsible for failures contributing to the chaos.
On Tuesday, the UK’s busiest airport introduced a limit of 100,000 departing passengers daily until 9/11 and asked airlines to stop selling summer tickets.
Emirates plans to operate as scheduled
emirates
Many passengers flying to and from Heathrow have suffered severe disruption in recent months, with long security queues and baggage system failures.
Emirates, which operates six daily return flights between the airport and Dubai, said in a statement: “LHR (London Heathrow) gave us 36 hours last night to meet capacity cuts, a figure that seems to come out of nowhere.
“Their communications not only dictated the specific flights we should kick paying passengers off of, but also threatened legal action for non-compliance.
“This is completely unreasonable and unacceptable, and we reject these demands.”
It added: “Until further notice, Emirates plans to operate as scheduled to and from LHR.”
Faced with an ‘airmageddon’ situation due to their incompetence and inaction, they (LHR) are shifting all the burden, costs and fighting to fix the problem onto the airlines and the travellers.
emirates
The Gulf carrier said its ground handlers at Heathrow are “fully ready and able to handle our flights”, meaning “the crux of the matter lies with the core services and systems that are the responsibility of the airport operator”. .
He claimed it would be “impossible” to rebook the number of passengers who would be affected by Heathrow’s cancellation demands.
Moving some of its operations to other UK airports at short notice is also not “realistic” as locating in a location that can facilitate a 500-passenger long-haul wide-body aircraft “is not as simple as finding a parking lot in a mall,” the airline said. explained.
The statement added: “The bottom line is that the LHR management team is cavalier with travelers and their airline customers.
“All the signs of a strong uptick in travel were there, and for months Emirates has spoken publicly about the matter.
“We planned ahead to reach a state of readiness to serve customer and travel demand, including rehiring and training 1,000 A380 pilots last year.
“LHR chose not to act, not to plan, not to invest. Now that they are facing an ‘airmageddon’ situation due to their incompetence and inaction, they are shifting all the burden, costs and fighting to fix the problem onto the airlines and the travellers.
“London Heathrow shareholders should review the decisions of the LHR management team.”
Virgin Atlantic’s chief operating officer and customer Corneel Koster called for a “measured approach” to tackling the disruption that balances the need for Heathrow to be more resilient with the impact of preventing people who “really want to travel” from boarding flights.
In an interview with PA News, he said: “We’re pretty concerned that what they’re doing isn’t focused enough.
“It should focus on ‘what are the bottlenecks, how are we temporarily mitigating them and how are we really going to overcome them?’
“We’re hoping they’ll show us the plan for how we’re going to get back to 2019 capacity.
“We haven’t seen enough plan.”
And he added: “We cannot give up the summer.”
In December last year, Heathrow said it expected passenger numbers by 2022 to reach 45 million.
He later raised his forecast to “almost 53 million” in May and 54.4 million in June.
Terminal 4 only reopened on June 14, some three months after the UK lifted all remaining coronavirus travel restrictions.
It was the latest terminal at a major European airport to resume operations during the pandemic.
Koster said: “Everyone should have been prepared for this surge in demand.
“If you’re around the table and the voice from Heathrow says ‘it won’t happen, it’ll come later, I’ll just open my fourth terminal in June’, that’s a planning error.
“They have minimized the demand. They should have opened T4 sooner.
“They should have played an even stronger role in the community.”
