As even pilots now pack luggage and employees depart the troubled industry in droves, baggage handlers have dubbed the turmoil at British airports “the biggest disruption ever witnessed.” At Manchester and Heathrow, enormous, winding lines of disgruntled travelers have formed.
Baggage handlers have expressed concern that the “Olympic-level strain” of recent weeks has made even seasoned colleagues into “emotional wrecks” and that new constraints brought on by staffing shortages following major layoffs during the pandemic have led many workers to leave the hard-hit industry.
They stated that baggage handlers are taking safety risks that could lead to broken necks if something goes wrong only to get the bags on board and get the flights off the tarmac, saying they only have two-thirds of the workforce needed to manage luggage safely.
‘Passengers are waiting up to six hours for their bags,’ a handler who works at one of the largest airports in the UK told the Sunday Times.
I recently witnessed a cleaner operating an unattended luggage trolley on the tarmac due to a lack of available baggage handlers.
And if folks think the delays are awful now, wait till they see what will happen when the kids break for the summer at the end of July and beginning of August.
The chaos at British airports persisted once more today as travelers rushed into Terminal 2 in Manchester at approximately 6am to drop off their luggage, while last night at Heathrow, a line of travelers formed that extended outside of T2.
It appears as:
The boss of Ryanair, Michael O’Leary, blamed the lack of airport employees on British people’s reluctance to work as baggage handlers, and Mick Lynch’s militant RMT paralyzed Britain once more yesterday by launching the third nationwide rail strike in a week.
Thousands of British Airways employees, including cabin crew and engineers, have threatened to strike during the school holidays.
Over 16,000 employees are being asked by militant unions if they want to join the more than 700 BA employees who have already agreed to walk out over pay at Heathrow.
When ITV correspondent Nick Dixon arrived at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 yesterday from Amsterdam, he was met by mountains of luggage at the arrivals.
My luggage, which is in another area of Heathrow with thousands of other goods, has not yet been reunited with me, according to fellow GMB employee Kieron Clarke. Staff can’t get to them, unfortunately. Even worse, due to a staffing shortage in the UK, those items are now being moved from London to Amsterdam for processing.
On Twitter, CBC Parliamentary Bureau reporter Ashley Burke said that the plan had been delayed by 10 minutes when she arrived, but security had been cleared in just 15 minutes. Despite not having checked a bag, she reported seeing “scattered [luggage] everywhere in the baggage claim area.”
“[I] arrived 12:28 from Australia into @HeathrowAirport,” one consumer from that country wrote. My bag’s journey from the plane to the baggage claim area has taken longer than the flight from France to the gate.
Another individual tweeted that they had to wait an hour for a shuttle bus to Terminal 5 and pleaded with the airport to provide more shuttles immediately since many were missing connections.
Another client complained that Heathrow Airport was a terrible mess. The only consolation is that British Airways planes always appear to be delayed, even after waiting for more than an hour (and counting) for a terminal bus transfer.
Today, a TUI representative was observed informing travelers that their flight to Palma has been delayed by 12 hours.
Then, while additional travelers waited to check in and drop off their luggage at other airlines including Pegasus and TUI, customers were seen sitting on floors at Manchester to pass the time.
At the airports in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, and Bristol, travelers endured lengthy lines yesterday as well.
Many airports specialists have identified the main problem as post-Covid recruitment.
According to the Telegraph, Ryanair, which is primarily located in Dublin and London Stanstead Airports, looks to have mainly avoided harm from the incident.
In comparison to 142 out of 13,010 (1.09 percent) BA flights, the low-cost carrier had three cancellations between May 7 and June 6 while easyJet had 16,425 flights with 636 (3.87 percent) cancellations.
The boss of Ryanair has mostly attributed the flight cancellations to Europe’s rigid labor market.
Ryanair, unlike some other airlines, anticipated the recovery coming ‘early,’ according to Michael O’Leary, who told the Telegraph that the firm has been “totally untouched.”
I’m not running for reelection on Brexit, he continued, but the UK will need to figure out a way to open up the labor market between the UK and Europe in order to bring people in to do the tasks that, quite frankly, British people don’t want to do.
“They don’t want to pick fruit,” the statement continued. “They don’t want to work in agriculture. They don’t want to work in hospitality.
In contrast to BA, Ryanair is not “dependent” on UK labor, according to John Grant, chief analyst at global travel data supplier OAG.
EasyJet has access to a wider choice of labor, but the majority of its bases are in significant Western European nations that have comparable resource problems with the UK.
“Ryanair has a far wider variety of bases across the entire continent of Europe and during the pandemic retained a higher percentage of its workers in certain of those bases, particularly in Eastern Europe,” the airline said.
Ryanair is also a “uncomplicated” airline with one aircraft, the Boeing 737, and short-haul European routes, according to Gilbert Ott, the creator of the travel advice website God Save the Points.
I don’t think many people realize how many weeks it takes to get employees through the necessary safety tests to resume flying, especially pilots, he added.
Additionally, European nations were the first to announce a busy summer of restrictions-free travel, which provided Ryanair plenty of room to expand and play an active role.
According to Mr. O’Leary, his pilots and cabin crew members were flying “far ahead of the predicted recovery,” even though they must fly every month to keep their licenses.
Cabin crew members must undergo an eight-week retraining period if their working hours expire.
We made sure to send up pilots and cabin crew, even on aircraft without any passengers, he continued.
At least once per month, we sent everyone flying. We didn’t just leave them all at home and promise to call you when everything was over in 18 months.
As Ryanair cabin crew employees started a three-day walkout in Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain on Friday, anyone traveling back to the United Kingdom may also experience delays.
The work stoppage had the most effect in Belgium, where it forced the biggest budget airline in Europe to postpone 127 flights to and from the airport in Charleroi, close to Brussels, between Friday and today.