Staff shortages and absenteeism due to Covid are affecting airlines and airports around the country.
According to experts, the pandemonium that has engulfed the United Kingdom’s airports over the past two weeks might linger for another year.
Thousands of tourists’ travel plans have been disrupted in recent days by lengthy security lines, lost baggage, and delays, with some even missing flights as a result of the hours-long waits for security clearance.
Like Dublin Airport, which is expecting about 500,000 passengers over the next few days, the challenges are due to an acute scarcity of personnel as demand for travel increases as a result of Covid entry restrictions being relaxed in a number of countries across the globe.
The hiring and training of airport employees takes time, especially for positions with the Border Force, which are recruited independently by the United Kingdom’s Department of the Interior.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Kully Sandhu, managing director of Aviation Recruitment Network Limited, which hires for Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports, said that he currently has more than 300 open positions advertised on the company’s job board.
‘In my own view, it will take at least the next 12 months for the vacancy situation in the business to stabilize,’ he added.
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Dublin Airport warns travelers not to come too early since 500,000 passengers are anticipated during the Easter weekend.
There are 10 ideas for navigating the security lines at Dublin Airport, including anything from arriving the night before to using a “VIP terminal.”
Over 4,000 people have applied for security positions at Dublin Airport after passengers were forced to wait outside the airport this weekend.
A total of 91 positions are presently advertised on the careers website of Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which operates Manchester, London Stansted, and East Midlands airports.
While this is going on, the Immigration Services Union (ISU) of the United Kingdom has said that Border Force is no longer attracting enough recruits to fill openings “for the first time in living memory.”
“When you consider that it takes nearly a year to fully train a Border Force officer, we are catastrophically understaffed going into not only this summer, but this weekend as well, with people beginning to travel again, and of course those who went out earlier this week will be coming back by the middle of next week as the school holidays have finished… we do anticipate that the queues will shift from security-based queues going outward to Border Force queues going inward.”
“This is a law enforcement function – you wouldn’t expect your police officer to be incompletely trained or not security vetted,” she said, emphasizing that there could be no short cuts when it came to recruiting and training Border Force personnel. “And we surely wouldn’t want anything else for Border Force,” says the author.
In advance of the long Easter weekend, when passenger numbers are predicted to reach 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels, the airline has announced the cancellation.
Dublin Airport, where passengers have been queuing outside Terminal 1 at peak times in recent days, is requesting that passengers arrive “no more than” 3.5 hours before their flights on Saturday, April 16. The airport also says it “is currently sold out in all of our car parks” on Saturday, April 16, and that it “is currently sold out in all of our car parks” on Sunday, April 17.
Staff illness and recruiting delays have also been a problem for UK airlines, with easyJet and British Airways both cancelling hundreds of flights during the Easter vacation period, according to the Financial Times.
Among the causes contributing to an increase in the number of flight cancellations, according to EasyJet’s CEO, are delays in conducting security checks for new airline crew members, as well as the necessity to cut planned flights at the last minute owing to staff illness on the airline.
“We were seeing up to 20 percent absenteeism in certain circumstances, and you wouldn’t expect any airline to be able to fill that at any point in time,” Johan Lundgren said in an interview.
After being pressed to say how long the disruption would last, he said that “you would expect that the spike that we’re seeing in Covid infections, which is really present both here in the UK and [in] other parts of the network, is going to come down,” but that “this is something that we haven’t seen yet.”
Meanwhile, the schedules of Aer Lingus and Ryanair do not seem to have been much impacted by Covid’s absences.
Aer Lingus said in an interview with the Independent that “although we acknowledge that the industry as a whole is now experiencing operational problems as a result of Covid-19,” the airline is not currently experiencing substantial issues of this type.
ie.
We have added extra layers of operational resilience to our resources in order to deal with the current issues, and we are continuing to work towards our goal of achieving 90 percent of pre-pandemic flying by the middle of this summer, the company said.
We reached out to Ryanair for comment, but they did not respond in time.
Pól Conghaile contributed additional reporting.
“When you consider that it takes nearly a year to fully train a Border Force officer, we are catastrophically understaffed going into not only this summer, but this weekend as well, with people beginning to travel again, and of course those who went out earlier this week will be coming back by the middle of next week as the school holidays have finished… we do anticipate that the queues will shift from security-based queues going outward to Border Force queues going inward.”
“This is a law enforcement function – you wouldn’t expect your police officer to be incompletely trained or not security vetted,” she said, emphasizing that there could be no short cuts when it came to recruiting and training Border Force personnel. “And we surely wouldn’t want anything else for Border Force,” says the author.
In advance of the long Easter weekend, when passenger numbers are predicted to reach 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels, the airline has announced the cancellation.
Dublin Airport, where passengers have been queuing outside Terminal 1 at peak times in recent days, is requesting that passengers arrive “no more than” 3.5 hours before their flights on Saturday, April 16. The airport also says it “is currently sold out in all of our car parks” on Saturday, April 16, and that it “is currently sold out in all of our car parks” on Sunday, April 17.
Staff illness and recruiting delays have also been a problem for UK airlines, with easyJet and British Airways both cancelling hundreds of flights during the Easter vacation period, according to the Financial Times.
Among the causes contributing to an increase in the number of flight cancellations, according to EasyJet’s CEO, are delays in conducting security checks for new airline crew members, as well as the necessity to cut planned flights at the last minute owing to staff illness on the airline.
“We were seeing up to 20 percent absenteeism in certain circumstances, and you wouldn’t expect any airline to be able to fill that at any point in time,” Johan Lundgren said in an interview.
After being pressed to say how long the disruption would last, he said that “you would expect that the spike that we’re seeing in Covid infections, which is really present both here in the UK and [in] other parts of the network, is going to come down,” but that “this is something that we haven’t seen yet.”
Meanwhile, the schedules of Aer Lingus and Ryanair do not seem to have been much impacted by Covid’s absences.
Aer Lingus said in an interview with the Independent that “although we acknowledge that the industry as a whole is now experiencing operational problems as a result of Covid-19,” the airline is not currently experiencing substantial issues of this type.
ie.
We have added extra layers of operational resilience to our resources in order to deal with the current issues, and we are continuing to work towards our goal of achieving 90 percent of pre-pandemic flying by the middle of this summer, the company said.
We reached out to Ryanair for comment, but they did not respond in time.
Pól Conghaile contributed additional reporting.
