Early passengers to be held in holding areas under Dublin Airport plans
DAA chief executive to blame ‘anomaly’ that saw uncertified staff rostered for duty for chaotic scenes last weekend
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Passengers queueing at Dublin Airport on Monday. Photograph: John Ohle
By Barry O'Halloran, Jack Horgan-Jones and Harry McGee
Wed Jun 1 2022 - 11:36
Dublin Airport boss, Dalton Philips, said on Wednesday that the airport “failed in our duty” to passengers and offered deep apologies.
And he said the airport was confident it can deliver the service expected of it over the coming bank holiday weekend “if people will heed the two and a-half hour” queuing guidance. “We are in a very difficult situation, we’re dealing with fine margins,” he said.
Appearing before the Oireachtas Joint Transport Committee, the DAA chief executive assured passengers hit by last weekend’s delays that they will not be “out of pocket”. He said they could email Dublin Airport or check its website to seek compensation.
Dublin Airport will compensate passengers for accommodation at their destination “if they do not have insurance and it’s our fault”, Mr Philips said.
Mr Philips blamed an unexpected surge in air travellers and recruitment problems for the delays that caused 1,000 passengers to miss flights. He said the DAA was making significant progress in hiring new staff but cautioned that they could not be “onboarded” quickly.
He said the airport handled a similar number of people last Friday as on Sunday without incident.
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The DAA's plan for managing ques in Dublin airport over the June Bank Holiday weekend.
Among measures to address the ongoing crisis, passengers arriving too early for flights at Dublin Airport will be “triaged” and asked to wait in a holding area as part of an effort to control queuing, the committee was told.
However, Mr Philips said the airport did not expect to use passenger holding areas outside its terminals this weekend.
“We don’t anticipate it, but we have to be prepared for it,” he said.
He said passengers should aim to arrive at the airport two and a-half hours early for short-haul flights and three and a-half for longer journeys. Up to another hour is being advised if passengers have bags to drop or check-in.
The transport committee will also hear that an “anomaly” led to 17 new recruits being rostered on security detail last Sunday before they were certified, causing travel chaos at Dublin Airport.
However, the DAA will say that new measures mean it is “confident and (has) a robust plan and (does) not envisage a repeat of what occurred last Sunday”.
He said the airport would have 40 extra security officers working over the bank holiday weekend, and hopes to bring 167 new security officers on board by the end of June, bringing the total number to 702. That number will rise further, to 800, over the summer.
“We are 60 security officers behind where we need to be; you are operating on very fine margins,” Mr Philips said.
He said Dublin Airport is considering asking staff from airports in Britain other EU countries to aid it in getting dealing with the squeeze. However, he cautioned that it they would still have to get clearance to work here, but says this can be done quickly.
The main problem is a shortage of security staff qualified to operate x-ray machines. Dublin will bring three to six officers certified to do this from Cork this weekend.
[ Explainer: Why is there chaos at Dublin Airport and will it improve by the June bank holiday? ]
He told the committee the airport was down 37 officers last Sunday from a rostered complement of 250 staff and 24 supervisors, which would have been enough to handle 50,000 passengers. Of the missing staff, 17 of these were new recruits which our rostering system had anticipated would have completed training to allow them to work last Sunday but they had not yet been certified”.
While the anomaly has now been resolved, Mr Philips will say, that shortage of staff compounded a loss of 20 officers who were absent from work that day.
Queues caused more than 1,000 people to miss flights from Dublin on Sunday, sparking outrage among passengers.
Many of the missing staff have particular clearances required to operate security lanes and cannot be readily substituted, Mr Philips will tell the committee. “We were unable to bring in substitute staff at short notice in the early hours of Sunday morning. This compounded the queuing problem throughout much of Sunday,” he will say.
This meant it could not open six security lanes, three in each terminal. This meant the airport could process 1,200 fewer passengers per hour than anticipated.
“As more and more passengers joined the growing queues for the available security lanes, the situation became compounded leading to a decision at 10.30am to advise those passengers queuing outside the terminal with flights departing before noon that they would not make their flights,” he will tell the committee.
Addressing the issue of the €97 million the DAA received from Government last year, he said it was specifically “to incentivise airlines to operate schedules this summer”
Responding to Fianna Fáil’s James O’Connor, he said the DAA cut staff by 25 per cent.
“We felt that going into 2022 with 70 per cent of our staff that we would be OK,” Mr Philips said. “We would have explained that there was a risk when you downsize. We took all the industry analysts data and we worked through that to try predict what the traffic levels would be.
“We were widely wrong. From March it took off at a level we never expected.” But, he said, events during January and February — the surge in infection with the Omicron strain of Covid and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — actually hit passenger numbers and were “very concerning”.
Airport finance chief Catherine Gubbins told the committee the Government had paid the DAA about €4 million a month in Covid wage supports.
She said that, at the end of 2019, the State company had a wage bill of €20 million a-month. Government aid and pay cuts saved up to €9 million a month. Without those actions, Ms Gubbins said, DAA would have lost €1 million a day during the pandemic.
The deployment of the army to help prevent a repeat of the chaos that occurred the airport last Sunday has been firmly rejected as an option by Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence Simon Coveney. Sinn Féin had called on the Defence Forces to be brought in to help alleviate the queues and delay, especially in relation to security checks.
Asked on Wednesday about his possibility, Mr Coveney strongly ruled it out. “I don’t think it’s the role of the Defence Forces to run an airport. The day has significant resources available to it. It should be able to respond with a professional management response to the mistakes and learning of last weekend, and we expect them to do that,” he said.
However, Mr Coveney warned that if this happened again it would have a detrimental effect on Ireland’s reputation internationally. “If this were to happen, again, repeatedly that would have, I think, a significant impact on our international reputation.
Documents given to the Oireachtas transport committee also show that additional security staff have been “secured” from Cork Airport, and that increased resourcing levels will “drive a 10 per cent increase in total security lane capacity” — and that queues of circa one hour can be expected by passengers at times over the coming weekend. A strong Garda presence is planned during peak periods. The same documents show that peaks are expected on each day from Thursday to Monday in the morning, when “first waves” will see between 15,000-16,000 passengers arriving, followed by another three smaller waves of decreasing intensity, each consisting of between 8,000 and 14,000 passengers. Lane capacity will be increased versus last week by between zero and 50 per cent.
Advice to passengers will remain to arrive at the airport 2.5 hours before short haul and 3.5 hours before long haul flights.
The DAA will blame a surge in passenger numbers, “significant challenges” in staffing and cumbersome background checks on new hires for chaotic scenes last weekend which saw more than 1,400 people missing flights.
However, he will say he has confidence in an updated plan to keep the airport operating, and point to the fact that similar numbers flew through Dublin Airport on Friday as last Sunday “without incident and without undue delay”, but say that “on Sunday that plan failed”.
Access to terminals will be controlled and will require documentation indicating the time of flight such as booking confirmation or a boarding card, and DAA will put in place bad weather cover, seating and toilets in the holding area “as quickly as possible”.
The company will say it planned for passenger numbers between 75 per cent and 80 per cent of 2019 levels, but was met traffic that was almost as high as pre-pandemic levels in advance of chaotic scenes last weekend.
“Every credibly ratings agency, analyst and industry body” predicted traffic levels would be less than 70 per cent of 2019, Mr Dalton will say
The airport planned for 75-80 per cent. “However, by May, traffic going through terminal 1 alone was at 95 per cent of 2019 levels.”
“To put this in context, on average during May, the airport has handled almost 16,500 extra passengers every single day which no one in the industry had predicted six months ago.”
He will also say there have been “significant challenges in ensuring that the airport has sufficient people, particularly in security screening, to process these huge levels of passengers”. During the pandemic, he will say numbers using the airport collapsed and DAA was losing €1 million a day.
[ ‘Beyond a joke’: Bank holiday travellers anxious about Dublin Airport delays ]
“The consensus was that we would face a long slow recovery”, he will say, which meant they took the “difficult decision” to reduce staffing levels by 25 per cent across 2020 and 2021. He will defend DAA’s recruitment strategy, saying that it began hiring at “significant levels” in the second half of 2021 once the outlook for the industry began to improve off the back of increased vaccination and a “lowering of infection”.
New EU background checks meant “we faced huge challenges” in bringing new people on board — meaning the airport lost 40 per cent of the new security staff it had recruited, and the remainder had to wait an additional seven weeks before they could start working.
“This created a big resourcing gap that we have been working to address ever since,” he will say, adding that Covid related absenteeism at the start of the year meant 25 per cent of all security staff were absent at that time.
While more than 300 new hires have been made and 70 security officers will come on board in the coming weeks, the committee will be told the “onboarding” of these staff cannot be rushed. “While we are making significant progress, it will take us another month before we get the full complement of additional trained security officers deployed on the floor of the airport”.
Non-security staff are working shifts in that section and overtime and incentives have been made available, and while Mr Philips will point to progress, he will say: “The fact remains that we have been — and are still — managing a resource gap as we pivot from losses of €1m per day and 1,000 redundancies during Covid to a dramatic recovery of air travel, faster and earlier than anyone predicted”.
Mr Philips will tell the committee that he wants to apologise unreservedly and that what happened at the airport “jars with our tradition of providing a positive passenger experience for our passengers”, and that what happened “fell extremely short of our desired standards”.
“I appreciate the anger, frustration and upset that this has caused,” he will tell the committee, adding: “I also recognise the reputational damage to our country for which connectivity and ease of access is our lifeblood”.
Mr Philips, who is due to leave the DAA and join sandwich maker Greencore later this year, will tell the committee that passengers can be assured they will not be left out of pocket. “These challenges were not of passengers’ making in any way, and we will work closely with everyone impacted to make sure that they are not impacted financially”.
He will also thank DAA’s employees “and their commitment and their efforts which have been outstanding, particularly over recent weeks and months”.
The holding pens will be shared equally amongst Dublin's homeless and Ukrainian War refugees a spokesperson for DAA said.
