Emirates statement on operations at London Heathrow | Hacker News Reader

Emirates statement on operations at London Heathrow

emirates.com

131 pointskhet34 comments

This is a week old. Emirates did agree to cap passengers: https://liveandletsfly.com/emirates-heathrow-compromise/

> After extensive meetings involving Sir Tim Clark, Emirates’ President, and John Holland-Kaye, CEO of Heathrow Airport, the two have kissed and made up, with Emirates agreeing to “cap” selling more tickets but insisting upon not cancelling any flights ... The beauty of this statement is that both sides save face and Emirates actually agrees to nothing, since it might well “cap” sales at 100%…there is no explanation of what capacity further sales will be capped.

Saying Emirates agreed to cap passengers is highly misleading. They agreed to cap further sales, with no comment by how much, and refused to do anything about already sold tickets.

some added nuance

> “Emirates has capped further sales on its flights out of Heathrow until mid-August to assist Heathrow in its resource ramp up, and is working to adjust capacity. In the meantime, Emirates flights from Heathrow operate as scheduled and ticketed passengers may travel as booked.”

“ Until further notice, Emirates plans to operate as scheduled to and from LHR.” Anyone more familiar with airport operations care to explain how this is feasible, if LHR doesn’t think they have what it takes to handle the load?

Paraphrasing the saying about debt: If 10 people can't get on the flight it's the airlines problem. If 10000+ people a day arrive at the airport and can't get on the flight, that's airport's problem.

I think it just means they’ll suffer the consequences and have pointed their finger at who’s to blame if it goes wrong

Probably meant to force some reconsideration

For what its worth, this seems to be a global occurrence -- there's been quite a lot of talk about Air Canada & Toronto's Pearson airport. Presumptively, people will continue to blame the federal government like they do for gasoline while failing to see it as part of a global trend.

Canada policy sometimes follows in UK footsteps. There's a relevant table on page 7 of this 2020 UK document, https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1810/29941...

It's worth noting that every other UK airport seems to be running smoothly.

There's just something wrong with the operational capabilities at Heathrow. I have a feeling they might be deliberately operating badly to try to get permission for an extra runway...

Heathrow is the largest British airport by far. The second-largest, Gatwick, pre-emptively cut a whole bunch of flights in July and August about a month before Heathrow decided to do the same, the third largest is apparently Manchester which I think has been having problems for months (so much so that they no longer even make the news anymore), and so on. Iut doesn't seem to be isolated to the UK either, I've been hearing about very similar problems elsewhere in Eruope from people travelling there.

Yeah, the entire travel story of the summer is that every airport is kind of screwed, it's not remotely limited to Heathrow. According to this source, Heathrow actually outperformed every other London airport except Stansted in terms of percentage of flights successfully departing in June.

https://thepointsguy.co.uk/news/worse-uk-airports-cancellati...

And of course Manchester had some well publicized issues, and outside of the UK AMS and CDG had massive problems as well. I mean, KLM flat out stopped flying ticketed passengers into AMS for a day to try to recover.

"At the end of Saturday afternoon, 4 June, KLM was regrettably compelled to decide that passengers at European destinations would no longer be allowed to board flights to Amsterdam."

https://simpleflying.com/klm-suspends-all-flights-from-europ...

A family member who needs to fly to Lima via Amsterdam just got an email that KLM doesn't allow luggage for passengers with a connection from another European airport.

That's after paying nearly 200 Euro for a second piece of luggage.

Oh, they apologize sincerely for the inconvenience caused, but don't bother to provide any options for long haul travellers.

I can't put this any nicer, but: Fuck you! KLM, I, for one, will make sure to never use you again. Especially not long haul, via Amsterdam.

They are doing you a favor. That bag would likely not have made it to its destination due to ground handling troubles outside their control.

Just had family flying TLV through Munich. 2 out 4 pieces of luggage lost (Lufthansa/UA codeshare).

If you are going to travel with a checked bag, 100% recommend airtag'ing them.

Heathrow has always operated badly.

For example, they don't do one-stop-security at all for transit passengers. Fly from UK/EU/North America to Heathrow to somewhere else? Heathrow will re-check your carryon luggage and put you through the metal detector upon arrival as if you came in off the street. The only exception is if Heathrow is your final destination.

Major EU and North American airports don't waste their time with already screened passengers from trustworthy countries, but Heathrow is too disorganized to organize itself to save all this time.

https://blog.aci.aero/dont-stop-me-now-how-one-stop-security...

I missed a connection on a 4+ hour layover at Heathrow once due to this.

The runway is the least of the problems, it's the last/first leg of the whole airport pipeline, it's the whole check-in and luggage handling that's a clusterfuck. An extra runway for planes to land and bring more people and luggage when the staff is already overwhelmed? An extra runway so more planes can take off, i.e. more passengers and luggage that need to be placed onto those planes before the pilot can take off?

I took a delta flight (Virgin doing the check-in) from Heathrow to Seattle three weeks ago and holy shit they were utterly, insanely slow. I had Sky Priority so got the “fast” line. It took an hour and twenty minutes to check in the two families in front of us, plus ourselves. Three sets of travelers in eighty minutes!

The whole place was a mess, with unclear lines and multiple people checking exactly the same things.

It looked like a serious lack of training (the people in front of us had a bag that was too heavy and the agent didn’t know how to handle it) and a complete lack of management.

Oh, and the conveyer belt broke as well.

I don’t think that logic holds up. Why give Heathrow another runway when they can’t even effectively operate the ones they’ve got?

https://archive.ph/iJWL2

This some breakthrough in corporate communication. It feels real. It feels human.

No wishy washy BS.

Emirates is pissed at LHR and they are open about it.

Emirates is less of a corporation and more an organ of the Emirate of Dubai. As such this conflict almost escalated into a diplomatic incident and the UK government hastily made an announcement soon after that they were investigating WTF is going on at Heathrow.

But entirely managed by Brits. Nothing gets quite as scathing as an upper-middle class Brit letting it rip.

You can only do this when you're really pissed and you no longer care about working cooperatively with your counterparties, particularly LHR's management team.

Yeah, they specifically imply shareholders should be firing the management

Or more precisely that the government should be firing the Spanish company that owns Heathrow, with a well-deserved reputation for incompetence (they were forced to divest Gatwick and Stansted).

That said, the government is even more incompetent than Heathrow, as shown by the shambles at DVLA or the IR35-linked shortage in HGV haulers, so the incompetence goes well beyond Brexit and it is highly unlikely anyone chosen to replace Heathrow management would be even worse.

It boils down to who they are trying to appease. With the potential backlash they would have got from customers and damage to their brand it makes sense to position themselves as 'taking a stand on behalf of the customer'. If there was more to lose in regards to their relationship with LHR, we'd have seen a wishy washy 'we are sorry, here are some refunds'.

Furthermore, now they are in the position to put in another notice to the effect claiming - Look we tried, we are sorry it didn't work out, here are some refunds

Just came to say the same. It's absolutely refreshing.

It's pretty clear; their partners screwed them and they suffer even when having plenty of advance knowledge of the passenger surge.

It's a little verbose and there's at least 1 typo, but I generally agree.

It feels nice when a corporate statement isn't sugar-coated to the point of being meaningless.

That's because the statement target isn't LHR sharehokders but the public.

If the target were shareholders and management they would've wrote privately.

With this move they are aiming for public pressure on LHR management and other stakeholders.

I appreciate the messaging too. It definitely feels as a person wrote it and not a faceless corporate entity. However, as the self-proclaimed reigning typo champion several years running I will say you'd think a PR person would do a once-over on the text for mistakes before publishing.

It's normal to have typos. Not everyone's first language is English. I'd rather read a statement like this with typos than a typical BS.

This doesn't even have anything to do with the first language. Everyone makes typos.

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