“Don’t panic” about Omicron variant, Heathrow boss says
Heathrow’s chief executive John Holland-Kaye told both the aviation industry and passengers not to panic about the latest Covid variant, Omicron.
Speaking at London’s World Aviation Festival, he said: “We’re going to have a lot of these variants over the years. I suspect that with most of them, vaccines will be fine. We got through half the alphabet without changing our plan.”
Holland-Kaye called the new virus strain a “speed bump” into the UK aviation sector’s recovery, saying the country – given its strong vaccination programme – is better equipped than others to face the latest Covid storm.
“We should be able to come out of this stronger than some of the other countries we’re competing with and that hopefully will give us the opportunity to get back to being Europe’s number one airport.”
In pre-pandemic times the airport used to see around 81 million passengers pass through its gates but, after 18 months of pandemic, Heathrow announced in September it had slipped to the tenth position in the European rankings. According to the chief executive, this was caused by the UK having more constraints compared with the EU or the US.
“Not only have they been more open to international markets, they have had their own domestic markets, which we have been excluded from,” Holland-Kaye added. “Our domestic market has pretty small volumes, certainly not big enough to keep one of the world’s biggest hubs going.”
Holland-Kaye added “there’s still a long way to go” to get back to pre-Covid passenger levels, given that going back to a world without travel restrictions is the only way.
When asked about the recent issues to Heathrow’s e-gate system – which have failed numerous times in the last three months, leaving passenger stuck in hour-long bottlenecks – the chief executive said they don’t just involve the hub but it’s a problem that the whole aviation industry needs to fix.
“The whole process of getting off a plane has been fantastically automated over the last decade, but Covid has put a spoke in that.
“We’ve suddenly had to adapt to having lots of manual interventions where we can’t use technology and we just don’t have enough people who can manage or enough space for people to queue. We’re not designed for that.”
Holland-Kaye said that to solve the issue, all stakeholders – including governments – need to develop better contingency plans.
“We’ve become so addicted to automation and the efficiency that comes with it that we haven’t done enough to put contingency plans in place for when automation fails,” he said. “That’s why we need to work together to come up with a good plan so that we have the people who can step in and have a manual process to replace.”