Aviation industry sources have downplayed fears of IT problems causing widespread disruption at airports this summer after serious delays hit arrivals across the UK on the final May bank holiday weekend. However, they warn of delays due to strikes by air traffic controllers throughout the summer.
A failure of all 270 UK e-gates on Friday night led to delays of up to four hours for international arrivals on Saturday, with passengers forced to queue for manual passport checks.
The disruption was compounded by British Airways cancelling more than 175 flights on Thursday and Friday due to a system failure.
The Home Office blamed a “border system fault” but gave no details. A source at the PCS union, which represents Border Force officers, claimed the e-gates had been “failing for some time” and warned of “massive queues unless this problem is fixed”.
Yet a leading airline source told Travel Weekly: “We’re getting a lot of people through these e-gates, which are not falling over all the time. The system is pretty solid. [But] it was a major outage and challenging.”
The source noted that aviation leaders met with the Department for Transport at an aviation council meeting last week “and no one saw this coming”, adding: “We’ve been discussing aviation resilience consistently. We’re much more worried about ATC strikes through the summer.”
A second aviation source said: “We’re trying to get to the bottom of what happened. If it was a one-off and Border Force has patched the problem, we need to know.” Asked whether e-gates at Heathrow “had been failing” as reported, the source said: “We don’t know that is accurate. There have been no problems since Saturday.”
Ryanair emphasised the threat of delays due to ATC strikes when it presented a petition with more than 1.1 million signatures to the office of EC president Ursula von der Leyen on Wednesday, demanding the EU “protect overflights” during strikes.
Michael O’Leary, Ryanair chief executive, said: “We’ve had 57 days of ATC strikes in the first five months of this year, mainly in France. We’ve had 1,200 Ryanair flights cancelled, 17,000 flights delayed and 2.8 million passengers affected.”
He noted the next ATC strikes are due on June 6 and said: “The challenge is France is so big. We’re being forced to cancel flights and there is no way of re-accommodating passengers over the following four, five, six days because flights are full.”