Gatwick and its biggest airline customer, easyJet, have clashed over who was to blame for the Christmas Eve travel chaos which left passengers stranded for 12 hours.
The budget carrier accused the airport of failing to respond quickly enough to the crisis at the North Terminal in an ill-tempered hearing in front of the Commons Transport Select Committee yesterday, The Telegraph reported.
EasyJet lost £2 million as a result of flooding and consequent power failures at the terminal, MPs were told.
The airline’s head of operations at Gatwick, Jason Holt, accused the airport of failing to provide enough staff to bus passengers, who had expected to take a flight from the North Terminal, to the South Terminal, which was unaffected.
Gatwick only admitted to a shortage of drivers to transport passengers at 1pm on Christmas Eve, more than eight hours after the airport’s management had been alerted to the risk that the nearby River Mole would flood, easyJet claimed.
The airline would have cancelled more flights rather than leaving passengers waiting for hours had it known about the driver shortage earlier, Holt suggested.
Only four buses were available to transport thousands of passengers from one terminal to another.
Holt said he was met with scenes of “biblical proportion” at the North Terminal on Christmas Eve morning, when he sought to address 3,000 “distressed” passengers, many of whom had young children and babies.
Gatwick chief executive Stewart Wingate, who was on annual leave in Newcastle on Christmas Eve but was responding to the crisis by telephone, said he was “very sorry” for the disruption caused.
Some 62 departures and 59 arrivals were cancelled.
Wingate said the airport took the decision not to cancel more flights and instead sought to bus passengers to a different terminal as it was Christmas Eve.
“We fell short but we did so in trying to get as many of our passengers to their Christmas destinations as we could,” he said, insisting that the airport had not seen a similar flood since 1967.
Gatwick has offered passengers whose flights were cancelled on Christmas Eve £100 of high street vouchers as a gesture of goodwill but Wingate said: “I can’t shoulder all of the responsibility as the airport operator.”
He added: “Ultimately it is not the airport that cancels flights.”
MPs on the committee questioned whether the flooding, which caused problems with the distribution of power at the North Terminal, would weaken the airport’s case for a second runway.
Wingate insisted that Gatwick still had an “exceptionally strong case” for a second runway and the airport, which is carrying out an investigation into the events of December 24, would make “whatever investment is needed” to protect its facilities against flooding in future.