Airlines must accept the blame for the travel chaos

If you have a flight booked in the next few months, it’s time to worry. A new era of air travel has arrived, in which reliability has been replaced with roulette. Airlines take bookings for flights they know might not take off. If staff shortages mean the flight is cancelled, passengers aren’t told until the last minute and are often denied compensation. And good luck finding a more reliable carrier. EasyJet, Wizz Air, British Airways: they’re all at it. Heathrow airport says the disruption may last until the end of next year.

There is no doubt that lockdowns were crippling for the air industry. Even when foreign travel was permitted again, it was under intimidating regulations. So-called ‘ghost flights’ – whereby airlines flew empty planes to keep their landing rights – became routine. But airlines made the travel crisis worse by demanding furlough money even after the scheme ended and then laying off staff, gambling that a fire-and-rehire strategy would save money overall.

There has been a political tug of war between the airlines and the unions. Both sides blame the government – and Brexit. In a meeting with Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, airline bosses demanded that immigration rules be relaxed for EU aviation workers. At one point, Michael O’Leary, the head of Ryanair, said the army should be sent in to fill job vacancies and get ‘rid of all these queues and flight delays almost in an instant’. Steve Heapy, the chief executive of Jet2, complained that ‘hundreds of thousands, if not millions’ of Europeans working in Britain have gone back home.

But is this really so? The numbers of workers from the EU did drop during the lockdowns but have since recovered. Almost one in five workers in the UK is an immigrant, an all-time high.