Heathrow says it has been overtaken as Europe’s busiest airport for the first time by Paris Charles de Gaulle because of a slump in demand for air travel.
Some 19 million passengers used Heathrow in the first nine months of the year, versus 19.3 million who used the airport in the French capital.
Heathrow said Amsterdam Schiphol and Frankfurt were “close behind”. It said all three rivals had adopted testing regimes as a way of people reducing or avoiding quarantine. By contrast, Britain had been “too slow to embrace passenger testing” and was “falling behind”.
Heathrow reported an 84% fall in passenger numbers for the three months to September as losses for the year to date widened to £1.5bn.
“Already in France and Germany, even Canada and Ireland have moved to testing and this is the way to make sure we can protect jobs in the UK as well as protecting people from coronavirus,” Mr Holland Kaye told the BBC.
“The government really need to get on and make this happen before the beginning of December if we are going to save people’s jobs.”
‘No commitment’
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has said he wants to have post-arrivals testing up and running in the UK by 1 December.
This would reduce the amount of time arrivals from high risk destinations had to spend in quarantine from 14 days – seen as a big deterrent to travel – to a week.
But Mr Holland Kaye said the industry still needed a “commitment” it would happen.
He added that the only way to really revive air travel was to bring in widespread pre-departure testing that met internationally agreed standards.
Source: bbc.com
