PLANES ALL PARKED AT GRAVEYARD GATWICK
FROM a helicopter hovering high above the Surrey countryside, it feels like I’m looking down on the biggest, most elaborately laid-out collection of Airfix model planes ever assembled.
Directly below me, eight miniature British Airways jets encircle a hub. Beside them, dozens more tiny aircraft from the nation’s flagship carrier are parked in zigzag formation, Union flag tailfins glinting in the sun.
Further along the apron, the pattern turns bright orange as a flotilla of 50 or more easyJet shuttles comes into view; beyond them lies a squadron bearing the sky-blue livery of Tui, the country’s foremost package holiday carrier.
I counted 114 planes standing idle at Gatwick Airport. They filled almost every bay at the North Terminal, which has been closed for weeks since the coronavirus pandemic killed off virtually all British air travel.
Mesmerising as it may have looked from 1,000ft up, it was a depressing and deeply worrying scene that symbolises the catastrophe besetting the country’s £106billion tourism industry, and the fears of the 2.6million people whose livelihoods depend on it.
It also encapsulated the disappointment of millions of families still clinging to the hope of an overseas summer break to forget the misery of lockdown.
My doom-laden impression of the airfield is supported by statistics. On the first Thursday in June last year, 146,000 passengers thronged through the airport on 889 incoming and outbound flights.
This year, a grand total of 600 people passed through on seven flights – four departures and three arrivals. At least that was an improvement on the week before when, on one day, 23 people landed at the stillopen South Terminal.
With the concourses silent, the skies empty and scores of motionless jets, Britain’s second busiest airport might be renamed Graveyard Gatwick.
Matters might be less dire if the Government could see the imperative of opening up our airways and relaunching the travel industry, albeit with stringent safety measures, like other European nations such as Portugal.
This week, however, Gatwick – which has borrowed £300million to improve its liquidity, furloughed 90 per cent of its staff and made many others redundant – faced yet another monumental setback.
It is one that could send its hopes of a speedy recovery – and indeed those of every other UK airport – into a tailspin.
On Monday, despite protests from travel and hospitality bosses and Tory backbenchers, the Government activated its new hardline quarantine law.
With some exemptions for those deemed ‘essential travellers’, it requires everyone who enters the country – whether they are Britons returning home or foreign visitors – to self-isolate for 14 days. Those who disobey could be fined £1,000 in England (£480 in Scotland).
It contains so many caveats it seems unenforceable – checks will be made on the whereabouts of only one in ten incomers, for example – and many health experts say the law has little or no scientific merit.
It has come too late, they say, to have any meaningful effect on reducing infection rates.
Indeed, it emerged last week that the Government drew up the two-week quarantine rule without consulting its own scientific advisory group, Sage.
It has reportedly caused a bitter Cabinet split, with the Home Office and Department of Health broadly in favour, but the Treasury and Department for Transport opposed.
ASUMMER-lONG quarantine rule would cost our tourism industry a staggering £19.7billion, according to the Governmentfunded agency visitBritain.
It would also force the closure of thousands of businesses that depend on a healthy flow of tourists and throw hundreds of thousands out of work, including many in the thriving nearby community of Crawley, where the ripple effects of Gatwick’s demise are already being felt.
Steven Freudmann, of the Institute of Travel and Tourism, described it as ‘an unmitigated disaster’, adding: ‘You might as well put up a sign saying “Britain is closed”.’
Wandering around the ghostly
South Terminal this week, it seemed the nation’s doors had already been bolted. Within three months Gatwick has turned from the world’s second busiest single-runway airport – its volume of traffic surpassed only by one in Mumbai – into a kind of aviation mausoleum.
The sky began to fall in on the airport in the first days of lockdown – ironically, just as its fortunes were soaring. Passenger numbers and revenue had been rising, terminals have been upgraded, and more investment had been planned.
Although Gatwick – which will reopen the North Terminal on Monday – believes its costsaving measures should effect a quick recovery after the pandemic, it does not expect passenger numbers to return to their previous level for between three and four years. And unless the quarantine law is speedily abandoned, the bounce-back will surely take even longer.
Flying over Graveyard Gatwick, it seemed clear Boris Johnson must axe quarantine quickly. Anything less and most of those planes will surely stay grounded, and an industry that creates 10 per cent of our gross domestic product could nosedive into oblivion.