Aviation capacity issues ‘were underestimated’

Sue Davies, head of consumer rights at consumer group Which?, said the cancellation of thousands of flights and long queues at airports in recent months were caused by the impact of staffing shortages being “underestimated”.

She told the Commons’ Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee: “Both the industry and the government need to shoulder the responsibility for the chaos that we’ve seen.”

Ms Davies acknowledged that the sector has been “particularly affected” by the coronavirus pandemic, but stressed that consumers have “lost money and suffered huge emotional stress”.

She went on: “Particularly appallingly, we’ve been hearing from lots of people who have just had very little information about actually what’s happening on the ground.

“The airlines and the government were encouraging people to travel again, and we think they’ve just underestimated capacity issues, and the shortages both within the airlines and the airport services, including baggage handlers.”

Ms Davies accused airlines of selling tickets when “they don’t know for sure that those flights are actually going to be able to go”.

Oliver Richardson, national officer for civil aviation trade union Unite, said a ranking of the airlines making the most cancellations “almost exactly corresponds” with the number of job cuts they made during the pandemic.

He said that Ryanair, which made no compulsory redundancies, is in a “different position from the likes of British Airways”, which has been forced to cancel more than 100 daily flights due to staff shortages, after cutting 10,000 jobs.

British Airways refused to acknowledge that the job cuts are contributing to cancellations.

Labour MP Darren Jones, who chairs the committee, repeatedly questioned the airline’s corporate affairs director Lisa Tremble on the issue.

He asked her: “Do you think there was a connection between sacking 10,000 members of your staff using aggressive fire-and-rehire tactics, and now cancelling the most flights per day?”

Ms Tremble said “it’s very complicated”, stating that the company “had to protect as many jobs as possible”.