Speaking to the Manchester Evening News a fortnight into his new role, former Gatwick chief operating officer Chris Woodruffe warned the queues that have blighted the airport and its passengers for several months would likely continue for much of the summer season.
Passengers will continue to be advised to arrive three hours prior to their flights "on the nose" to clear check-in and security, Woodruffe confirmed. He also insisted "the big issues of earlier this year" were a thing of the past.
"It’s not going to be as good as we want it to be, it’s not going to be as good as it was in 2019, but what it will be is considerably better than it was three or four weeks ago," Woodruffe, who took up his new role last month, told the paper
"There are still going to be difficult periods, we are still on a recruitment ramp-up and as a result security officers are going to be fairly new and they are still finding their feet but you can see the positive steps in the right direction.
“The vast majority of passengers this summer are going to have a reasonable experience.”
His priority, he said, was "to get people away on their holidays without having lots of cancellations".
Around 50,000 people travel through Manchester ever day. Manchester is targeting getting 93% of passengers through security in less than 30 minutes, and eventually 95%. The figure was 91% in May.
Woodruffe, though, said he didn’t want people to think he was content with this level of performance. "It’s realistic of what the summer has to offer," he stressed, based on what he considered to be a "reasonable experience".
He added he had already entered into "open dialogue" with ground handlers Swissport and ABM, specialist assistance firm PRM and logistics firm DHL to tackle some of the key challenges facing the airport head on.
Many of these issues, though, will take until 2023 to solve said Woodruffe, flagging the recruitment crisis facing travel and aviation as a particular headache. "The entire industry has never had to recruit the volumes of people it has in 2022, and I very much hope it never has to again,” he said.
"It doesn’t matter which process you look at, none of them fit the purpose to meet the passenger demand."
