Police and fire officers have been placed on standby to maintain order at Manchester Airport amid warnings that chaos at the check-in desks will continue for days.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that he is ready to call in emergency services to help following a string of cancelled flights and hours-long queues for passengers.
It came as Manchester Airport’s managing director Karen Smart announced that she was stepping down “to pursue fresh career opportunities”.
She will be replaced by Ian Costigan, a senior executive at the airport, on an interim basis. He will be responsible for a recruitment drive to tackle staff shortages ahead of the summer season.
Mr Burnham said: “I have been in touch with colleagues at Greater Manchester Police at the weekend to see what we can do to support the airport.
“It’s a difficult moment for airports around the world having laid low for the pandemic, they’ve had to scale up very quickly. We understand the challenges that we’ve got.
“But at the same time, we don’t want to see the scenes that we saw at the weekend.”
Travellers have been facing massive disruption in Manchester, Heathrow and Gatwick driven by severe staff shortages as air travel picks up after a years-long Covid slump.
Families are now braced for further Easter travel chaos as easyJet said it expected to cancel more flights in the coming days.
The company is preparing to cancel another 70 flights to and from the UK today. More than 1,000 flights have already been axed over the past week, according to data company Cirium, compared to 197 the same week in 2019.
EasyJet warned that disruption was likely to extend over the Easter holidays. The company said that it will operate “the vast majority” of its 1,525 flights on Tuesday, with only a small proportion cancelled in advance.
The company said preemptive cancellations would continue over the coming days at a similar level because of high levels of sickness in its workforce.
A spokesman added: “We are sorry for any inconvenience for affected customers.”
Passengers travelling on other airlines are also being hit by last-minute cancellations, with hundreds more flights expected to be wiped from schedules in the coming days. Airlines are blaming a surge in Covid cases for causing absences to double compared with their normal levels.
It comes after many airlines sacked thousands of workers at the beginning of the pandemic, with insiders saying that lengthy wait-times for security checks on prospective staff were now delaying the recruitment of new employees.
British Airways cut 115 of its journeys for Monday owing to staff shortages, and has reduced its schedule for the coming weeks. At least 98 flights which had been due to fly to or from Heathrow for Tuesday were cancelled.
Industry experts said this process to get airlines back up to full capacity could take some time. John Strickland, director of transport consultancy JLS Consulting, said it would be “very difficult” for many airlines for the next few months.
Speaking to BBC’s Wake Up To Money, Mr Strickland said: “I think certainly the next month or two are going to be very difficult.
“We know that Manchester has said that passengers should expect queues for one to two hours for the next several weeks while they undertake additional training.”
Consumer groups, meanwhile, criticised the lack of guidance for travellers, who are still being told to “arrive early” for flights, but are not being given any sense of how long they could be queuing.
Rory Boland, the travel editor at Which?, said: “Airports know how many passengers there will be each day and how many staff there are, roughly. They should give passengers a concrete time to the hour to arrive.”
