As the East or West debate looms, the fragility of London’s main airport has been highlighted this week with news of cancelled flights dominating the UK media.
Heathrow is always fair game for journalists, knowing that for most readers, it could be them on their next flight. Passenger pain, in any form is therefore guaranteed to get their interest. So when something goes wrong, in this case, images of would-be passengers sleeping rough in a snow-bound airport, extensive media coverage was inevitable.
But without going into the painful details of how unprepared the airport operator was for a relatively small and well forecast scattering of snow, what’s evident here is simply a manifestation of lack of capacity. Any business running at 98.2% capacity has no resilience, a small grain of sand in the well oiled machine that is Heathrow Airport will have an immediate and disruptive effect on operations.
Unfortunately, there is no quick fix in sight to provide extra capacity for the airport and worse, there is as yet not even an agreed course of action to start the process, which is why the forthcoming East or West debate on the 5th February is so crucial…
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The grain of sand may have slight or catastrophic effects.
It is salutary to compare Heathrow and Gatwick operations over the last weekend and to bear in mind the comments made by the CAA on their approaches to working with the full airline communities to develop “Performance Charters”.
“An important driver of Performance Charters was to improve co-ordination during crisis situations….”
“After some effort, Heathrow has the grains of a Performance Charter in place…. but admits it still has a lot of work to so including making sure the airline community is fully engaged…..”
“Gatwick already has a number of measures and initiatives in place consistent with the SEAT reccomendations….It remains to
be seen whether Gatwick includes disruption planning in the charter. The airport currently sees no need to formalise existing arrangements which catered adequately with the snow event last winter, including accepting diversions from other airports.”
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/589/20121121%20Progress%20report%20for%20MoS%20on%20APFG.PDF
Would you want to put even more eggs in a dodgy basket ?