Emirates issued statement on operations at London Heathrow Airport

Friday, July 15, 2022

Thousands of UK travellers have been affected by disruption in recent weeks, with many having to deal with last-minute flight cancellations. The United Kingdom is about to enter the key summer holiday season as schools begin to break up and there are concerns travellers will be hit by further disruption and delays to journeys.

Emirates has rejected Heathrow Airport’s demands for airlines to stop selling summer tickets, calling the move “unreasonable and unacceptable”. The airline accused the airport of having a “blatant disregard” for customers after it capped passenger numbers to 100,000 per day over summer.

Emirates said the airport now faced “an ‘airmageddon’ situation due to their incompetence and non-action”.

Heathrow said it had no choice but to bring in a cap on departing travellers.

The UK’s largest airport said that for months we have asked airlines to help come up with a plan to solve their resourcing challenges, but no clear plans were forthcoming and with each passing day the problem got worse.

Emirates said it was given 36 hours to cut departing passenger numbers, and therefore flights, and was threatened with legal action for not complying. This is entirely unreasonable and unacceptable, and we reject these demands.

In a statement heavily criticising Heathrow management, Emirates accused the airport of choosing “not to act, not to plan, not invest” and said its new cap on passengers appeared to have been “plucked from thin air”.

It added it planned to operate flights to and from the airport as scheduled.

The cap on passenger numbers at Heathrow Airport will be in place from now until 11 September. Before the pandemic, up to 125,000 people a day departed from the airport.

Emirates value their partnerships with airport stakeholders across their network with whom they engage continuously, and collaboratively, to secure the flight operations and ensure minimal customer disruption, particularly over the peak travel months.

It is therefore highly regrettable that LHR last evening gave Emirates 36 hours to comply with capacity cuts, of a figure that appears to be plucked from thin air. Their communications not only dictated the specific flights on which we should throw out paying passengers, but also threatened legal action for non-compliance.

This is entirely unreasonable and unacceptable, and Emirates reject these demands.

At London Heathrow airport (LHR), our ground handling and catering – run by dnata, part of the Emirates Group – are fully ready and capable of handling our flights. So the crux of the issue lies with the central services and systems which are the responsibility of the airport operator. The Emirates is a key and steadfast operator at LHR, having reinstated 6 daily A380 flights since October 2021. From our past 10 months of regularly high seat loads, their operational requirements cannot be a surprise to the airport.

Now, with blatant disregard for consumers, they wish to force Emirates to deny seats to tens of thousands of travellers who have paid for, and booked months ahead, their long-awaited package holidays or trips to see their loved ones. And these, during the super peak period with the upcoming UK holidays, and at a time when many people are desperate to travel after 2 years of pandemic restrictions.

Emirates believe in doing the right thing by our customers. However, re-booking the sheer numbers of potentially impacted passengers is impossible with all flights running full for the next weeks, including at other London airports and on other airlines. Adding to the complexity, 70% of our customers from LHR are headed beyond Dubai to see loved ones in far flung destinations, and it will be impossible to find them new onward connections at short notice.

Moving some of our passenger operations to other UK airports at such short notice is also not realistic. Ensuring ground readiness to handle and turnaround a widebody long-haul aircraft with 500 passengers onboard is not as simple as finding a parking spot at a mall.

The bottomline is, the LHR management team are cavalier about travellers and their airline customers. All the signals of a strong travel rebound were there, and for months, Emirates has been publicly vocal about the matter.  We planned ahead to get to a state of readiness to serve customers and travel demand, including rehiring and training 1,000 A380 pilots in the past year.

LHR chose not to act, not to plan, not to invest. Now faced with an “airmageddon” situation due to their incompetence and non-action, they are pushing the entire burden – of costs and the scramble to sort the mess – to airlines and travellers.

The shareholders of London Heathrow should scrutinise the decisions of the LHR management team.

Given the tremendous value that the aviation community generates for the UK economy and communities, we welcome the action taken by the UK Department for Transport and Civil Aviation Authority to seek information from LHR on their response plans, systems resilience, and to explain the seemingly arbitrary cap of 100,000 daily passengers. Considering LHR handled 80.9 million passengers annually in 2019, or a daily average of 219,000, the cap represents greater than a 50% cut at a time when LHR claims to have 70% of ground handling resources in place.

Until further notice, Emirates plans to operate as scheduled to and from LHR. 

Inputs and Picture: Emirates

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