Ali Condon
Popular airline easyJet has announced that further flights will be cancelled over the summer period due to a range of issues.
Since the start of the busy summer months, easyJet flights from British airports have been cut, leaving devastated holiday-makers to cancel long-awaited trips abroad.
Issues such as airport handling delays and staff shortages are responsible for the wave of cancelled flights in recent weeks.
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Last week, Gatwick Airport announced plans to bring in flight caps for the months of July and August to help deal with staff shortages.
In response to a request from the Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority for airlines to review their schedules and ensure flights are deliverable, easyJet has revealed that a number of its flights will be cancelled as a result.
Announcing plans to cut flights, a statement from easyJet read: "In response to these caps and in order to build additional resilience, easyJet is proactively consolidating a number of flights across affected airports.
"This provides customers with advance notice and the potential to rebook on to alternative flights."
The statement added that "the majority" of passengers are expected to be rebooked on flights the same day.
It has not yet been confirmed how many flights the airline plans to cancel over the coming months, but easyJet has estimated that about 90% of the 160,000 flights sold in summer 2019 would run as normal this summer, leaving approximately 11,000 flights in danger of being scrapped.
The airline said that these issues are expected to be a "one-off this summer" with "greater resilience in time for 2023 peak periods".
According to easyJet, the financial quarter from 1 July to 30 September will see the airline operate over 140,000 flights with 22 million passengers, jumping to 550 percent of what it had carried out in the same period for 2021.
Chief executive for easyJet, Johan Lundgren, said that while the airline had no trouble recruiting staff, it was proving a struggle to get security clearance for them, noting that ID clearance alone is taking 14 weeks.
Mr Lundgren also pointed to the effects of Brexit as a reason for delays and cancellations.
He said: "Delivering a safe and reliable operation for our customers in this challenging environment is easyJet's highest priority and we are sorry that for some customers we have not been able to deliver the service they have come to expect from us.
"While in recent weeks the action we have taken to build in further resilience has seen us continue to operate up to 1,700 flights and carry up to a quarter of a million customers a day, the ongoing challenging operating environment has unfortunately continued to have an impact which has resulted in cancellations."