European airlines strive to avoid another summer of chaos

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European airlines, airports and air traffic controllers have made sweeping changes to their operations as the aviation industry tries to avoid another summer of disruption for passengers.

Changes to flight schedules and efforts to reduce the risk of strikes by air traffic controllers have left industry bosses optimistic that there will not be a repeat of last summer’s problems.

“In general the whole of the industry is better prepared . . . but you can never be complacent and relaxed,” said Johan Lundgren, chief executive of easyJet, the UK low-cost airline.

British Airways is under particular pressure to improve its operational performance, after only 60 per cent of its flights at London’s Heathrow airport were on time last year.

The carrier said it had made significant changes to its ground operations at Heathrow in response, including hiring 350 more staff, upgrading equipment such as baggage loading machines and buses, and updating its notoriously unreliable IT systems.

Airlines have spent the winter working with Eurocontrol, which manages Europe’s airspace and national air navigation providers, to improve the resilience of the region’s air traffic control network, including dedicating resources to ensuring the first wave of morning flights gets away on time.

“If you can get the first wave away all right, the rest of the day will largely run pretty good,” said Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Ryanair, the low-cost carrier that last year operated the most flights in Europe.

A wave of strikes by French air traffic controllers and a rise in summer storms combined to wreak havoc on flight schedules last summer, which is critical to airlines’ profits as the winter months are often lossmaking.

Just 71 per cent of flights in Europe landed within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival time last year, according to Eurocontrol data.

That was roughly the same level as in 2022, a year defined by the fallout from the pandemic as countries reopened borders and airlines were overwhelmed by the pent-up demand from passengers.

However, last year’s performance was 7 percentage points below 2019, the last year before Covid-19 forced the closure of much of the world’s airspace.

“At this point it looks pretty good, compared to pretty shit last year,” said O’Leary.

Two of the main French air traffic controller unions at the end of last year agreed with aviation authorities to avoid strikes during the Olympics and to desist from industrial action linked to pay issues for several months in return for higher bonuses. France’s air traffic controllers are also required to give 48 hours’ notice to go on strike under new rules.

Eurocontrol said it had also worked with airlines to introduce “realistic schedules” to ensure delays did not pile up.

Lundgren said easyJet had used artificial intelligence to pore over “a vast amount of data” to plan flight times for the summer.

The airline has increased turnaround times — the period a plane is on the ground between flights — at some busy airports to inject more flexibility into its schedules, and also has more standby aircraft on hand.

“There is a little bit less efficiency and productivity but then again we stand a better chance to deliver really robust resilience,” Lundgren said.

Nats, which runs the UK’s airspace, said it had put on daily calls with airlines and airports, which were last held before the pandemic, to co-ordinate responses to operational problems, including bad weather.

Kathryn Leahy, chief operations officer at Nats, said. “We have a great overview of the entire network so we hope the daily calls will be useful. Above everything, airlines and airports need stability in the system and to know if anything is likely to disrupt that.”

However, air traffic control delays remain the biggest threat to the industry’s peak travel season, with airspace still crowded after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine closed a fifth of Europe’s skies. As a result, tens of thousands of flights a day have been compressed into a smaller sliver of airspace in the south-east of Europe.

Smaller unions in France also resisted signing last year’s agreement, and the country’s Civil Aviation Authority is in the middle of presenting a new plan to improve productivity in the sector, which could lead to the shutdown of some control towers at very small airports.