The airline sector is “operating on a knife edge” due to limited infrastructure in the UK, according to the chief executive of The Board of Airline Representatives (Bar UK).
Dale Keller told Travel Weekly’s Future of Travel Conference 2023 the industry has suffered “decades of under-investment” which means it is a case of damage limitation for airlines when something goes wrong, such as the air traffic control meltdown over the August bank holiday weekend.
“We’ve got the third-biggest aviation market in the world with a relatively small and densely populated space,” he said.
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“If you look at Heathrow and Gatwick, they’re on postage stamp plots of land compared to what you find overseas, with no space to build new and bigger terminals, plus we haven’t got the runway capacity we need.
“We’re sweating all the assets which means the moment something goes wrong, like the Nats issue, we simply don’t have the space and infrastructure to build in the resilience.”
Keller said that when a major problem arises, it’s a case of “assessing what level of bad we’re dealing with and how quickly we can recover”.
The sector operated on a “knife edge” in the years leading up to 2019, before the pandemic struck, said Keller, adding it has returned to that position as demand has ramped up.
He said that on days on which there are normal operating conditions, the sector “makes something that’s incredibly difficult look incredibly easy”.
But he added: “When it goes wrong it can go spectacularly wrong, and we need to have more honest conversations about that.”
He said the sector’s key objectives are returning airlines’ schedules to normal at a faster pace and improving customer service in the event of disruption.
“The government knows we can’t miraculously have a ‘no disruption environment’ in the future, but it wants us to get better at recovering more quickly and treating our customers better – those are our key objectives,” he told attendees.