UK: Airport queues threaten travel revival, says Heathrow executive

The long-awaited restart of international travel in England risks being derailed by queues of up to six hours at airports, according to a senior executive at Heathrow. The few passengers currently arriving at the UK’s busiest airport often spend “well in excess of two hours and up to six hours” getting through passport control, Chris Garton, Heathrow’s chief solutions officer, told parliament’s transport select committee on Wednesday. At present, border officials must manually check all arriving passengers’ coronavirus paperwork, including passenger locator forms, detailing where people have been, and proof of a negative Covid test. Queues are forming even though non-essential travel is illegal and only about 10,000-15,000 passengers are landing at Heathrow every day, a tenth of normal levels.  The situation was so chaotic that police had been called to deal with “disruption” from exasperated passengers, Garton said. The government has said international travel could be allowed from mid-May for holidaymakers leaving English airports under a “traffic light” system, with Covid-19 testing but no self-isolation needed for travellers returning from countries on a “green” list. When mass travel resumes border checks would quickly become impossible to manage using the current system, according to Garton. “We want to see that bottleneck removed as soon as possible. It is a problem today, it will become a much bigger problem after May 17,” he said. <br/>