Airline chiefs say many of the issues which caused disruption in Europe this summer have “normalised” but argued all aviation firms should be using the quieter winter season to assess operations to ensure there is not a repeat next year.
Speaking during a panel discussion at World Travel Market, Tui Airline chief operating officer Dawn Wilson insisted discussions between airlines, airports and external suppliers had been ongoing throughout the Easter and summer period.
But she said “some (third) parties had been travelling in hope” with staff not sufficiently trained to fulfil their duties, adding “the last time I looked, hope is not a plan”.
She said: “The (staff) numbers were shown, but it’s whether you can actually turn that into people to do the job, so if they haven’t got an ID, or if they’re not trained to do the task you need them to do to push an aircraft back, that’s where things started to unravel.”
Wilson said airlines across Europe would be questioning how much of their operations they wanted to control in-house and how much should be outsourced, adding “there is an asymmetrical risk if you outsource too much of it and we saw some of that”.
She also expressed surprise at the “collapse” of operations at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, which she had previously “put on something of a pedestal”.
Aer Lingus chief executive Lynne Embleton agreed, adding: “Every time we sent an aircraft into Amsterdam it wasn’t coming back for hours and hours. Even if you have a plan, those plans were very quickly creaking at the seams and it showed the fragility of the system.”
She said: “My hope, and my expectation, is that every player in the system will use the relative off-peak to regroup, recruit and get everything ready (for 2023).”
Marion Geoffroy, managing director of Wizz Air UK, said issues with European air traffic control could not be swiftly solved, but said “disruption had normalised” and the airline was planning for Christmas operations and for next summer to ensure it was well-placed to avoid issues.
“You have a buffer for normal disrupted operations but what happened (in 2022) wasn’t normal,” she added. “We didn’t plan for a melting runway at Luton, and it felt that everything that could happen, did happen.”
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