The nightmare of a White Heathrow

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You may want to think twice whether it is a good idea to travel to, from or through London Heathrow between November and March, when there is a chance of 'heavy snow' (say 3 inches or 8 cm) in Greater London. Unlike other London airports, Heathrow was still not up to the job of clearing stands and runways of snow and keeping the airport running without too much disruption this winter.

On Sunday 5^th February 2012, Gatwick and Stansted experienced delays but almost all flights departed. 30 miles away, a spokeswoman for Heathrow said: ‘Airlines expect to operate about 50% of the 1,300 flights originally scheduled.’ She added: ‘Our snow plan has worked far better than in previous years and the airport is getting back to normal.’

Well done Heathrow’s PR department. This is how you present failure as an act of competence. The gaffe of the day came from Conservative Transport Secretary Justine Greening. Rather than lambasting Heathrow for doing a poor job as compared to neighbouring airports, she commended the airport for the way it had handled the problems. With such a Cabinet minister Heathrow can do without a PR department.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor, once famously said: ‘We don’t do God’. London airport bosses, however, regularly did God. As soon as it started to snow they were keen to explain that this was an Act of God for which they were not responsible. This may have been true in the old days, nowadays the damage/investment ratio (the costs of cancelling flights vis-a-vis the investment in snow clearing and de-icing equipment) has dramatically changed. Disruptions caused by heavy snow are now no longer an Act of God but an Act of the Airport, or rather the Airport’s Failure to Act.

In December 2010, both Gatwick and Heathrow were severely criticised for the chaos in the aftermath of heavy snowfall, which left thousands of people stranded with delays and cancellations beyond Christmas Day. Siim Kallas, the EU’s transport chief and vice-president of the European Commission, was furious. ‘I am extremely concerned about the level of disruption to travel across Europe caused by severe snow. It is unacceptable and should not happen again,’ he said. ‘Airports must get serious about planning for this kind of severe weather conditions’.

It looks like Gatwick, unlike Heathrow, got serious. Might this have something to do with ownership? And with Margaret Thatcher’s sorry politics to privatise public bodies without creating a proper market? In the 1980s, the British Airport Authority that operated seven airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Southampton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen) was privatised, turning it into a private company with an unhealthy market dominance around London and in Scotland.

It was only in 2009, following a report by the Competition Commission, that BAA sold Gatwick Airport to GIP, the owner of London City Airport. Competition was created. And whereas Gatwick has since made clear improvements in preventing disruptions because of snow, Heathrow has only come up with a major cancellation plan so that passengers can experience the flight disruption at home rather than at the airport. Either Heathrow has not invested in proper equipment as it promised it would do, or it bought the equipment but it is unable to operate it in a proper way.

After the Christmas 2010 disaster, the European Commission threatened to impose minimum service requirements unless airports could prove that planning and investment is in place to deal with snow. Heathrow’s cancellation plan is unlikely to convince the European Commission. 

Indeed, what is the point of having European air passenger rights, imposing obligations on airlines, if the EU’s busiest airport can get away with cancelling 50% of the flights, disrupting the travel plans of 100,000 passengers without there being extraordinary circumstances? In such a case airlines potentially would have to pay passengers 30 to 40 million euros in compensation. Perhaps there is an idea for Commissioner Kallas on top of his recent proposal on groundhandling services at EU airports: granting passengers not only rights against airlines but also against airports.

Your Air Passenger Rights at hand
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