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London’s Heathrow airport, one of the world’s busiest, has limited the number of departing passengers it will accommodate and has told airlines to stop selling tickets for the summer travel season.
The injunctions will remain in place until 11 September.
The mandates were imposed a day after the airport told carriers to cancel 61 flights when the number of passengers in a terminal exceeded the airport’s capacity to deal with them.
The airport is struggling with shortages of baggage handlers and counter and check-in staff as post-COVID demand for airline travel has surged.
Heathrow’s mandates follow similar moves by Gatwick, also in London, and Schiphol, Amsterdam’s chief airfield.
The three airports are gateways to Europe for U.S. travelers, who have flocked back to the skies as travel restrictions have disappeared and a strong dollar has made Europe a relatively cheap getaway.
Before the COVID War, Heathrow handled as many as 125,000 departing passengers a day, ranking it as the world’s second busiest airport behind Dubai International.
It now has limited that number to 100,000.
Since 1 June, Heathrow has scrapped 559 flights within seven days of departure, 299 percent more than during the same period in 2019, according to data service FlightAware.
That was 1.9 percent of all flights, compared to 0.5 percent in 2019.
The typical flight waited 36 minutes for takeoff last month, a third longer than in 2019.
TRENDPOST: We note this as just another example of the devastating human and economic toll that has been taken as a result of the COVID War which the mainstream media ignores and/or blame it on the “pandemic.”
And barely mentioned are the scores of billions of dollars given to the airline industry during the lockdowns that have enriched the corporations while costing the taxpayers and the passengers.