Border staff strike threatens 12 hour queues at Heathrow
25.11.11
Passengers could face 12-hour delays at Heathrow Airport next week, when immigration officers go on strike over pensions, airlines have been warned. The airport's chief operating officer Norman Boivin wrote to its airlines to say there was a real danger of ‘gridlock’. Heathrow has been holding talks with airlines and the UK Border Agency to try to minimise the impact of Wednesday's public sector strike. The Home Office has said it was exploring all options to minimise disruption.
Mr Boivin said in the letter: ‘The delays at immigration are likely to be so long that passengers could not be safely accommodated within the terminals and would need to be held on arriving aircraft. This in turn would quickly create gridlock at the airport with no available aircraft parking stands, mass cancellations or departing aircraft and diversions outside the UK for arriving aircraft.’
‘Modelling of the impacts of strike action on passenger flows at Heathrow show that there are likely to be very long delays of up to 12 hours to arriving passengers.’ To relieve the pressure, he has asked carriers to cut their ‘load factors’ (the number of passengers on each plane) by half on international flights arriving into Heathrow.
The warning came after immigration staff voted to join the strike by public sector workers. Strikes are being held over changes to public sector pensions and thousands of border agency workers are expected to be among up to two million who strike.
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