Gatwick boss: 'Heathrow can't cope so send flights to us instead'

Heathrow is damaging London’s reputation with its inability to cope with snowy weather and should run far fewer flights in winter, bosses at rival airport Gatwick said today.

“The way in which Heathrow chooses to respond to forecasted relatively minor snowfall is to cancel, with only 24 hours’ notice, hundreds of flights,” Stewart Wingate, chief executive of Gatwick, told Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin in a letter.

“This causes a significant number of passengers to suffer days of misery, as well as damaging the reputation of London as a world city.”

Mr Wingate’s attack came after hundreds of passengers were forced to camp out overnight at Heathrow, which had cancelled 187 flights by lunchtime today.

He wrote: “Our proposal is that Heathrow refrains from over-scheduling during December, January and February. With advance notice, the airlines and the other London airports will be able to operate significantly more flights to London. This would clearly be better for passengers than mass cancellations.”

A Heathrow spokesman said: “The Davies Commission has been set up by the Government to examine the issues of UK airport capacity. It is for the Commission to make recommendations for how the shortage of UK hub capacity should be addressed and to consider all options.”

At Heathrow today, British Airways had booked an extra 2,500 hotel rooms for stranded passengers and the airline apologised to 20 customers sent to the wrong hotel who ended up sleeping on the conference room floor at another.

On the first working day since heavy snowfall hit the region, experts said disruption to Tube, rail and air travel will cost the London economy hundreds of millions of pounds. Hundreds of thousands of rail passengers suffered delays of at least an hour as trains into London Bridge, Victoria and Waterloo operated on reduced winter services. Seven out of 11 Tube lines were disrupted due mainly to overrunning engineering work.

But much of the frustration was focused on Heathrow, which has spent £36 million on snowploughs since the 2010 disruption due to snow. Today’s cancelled flights, due to very low visibility, came on top of the 260 grounded yesterday.

Heathrow warned the figure could rise as other airports cancelled flights because of the weather. Paris, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Manchester and Glasgow were all affected. London City Airport reopened its runway at 7am after clearing ice, but there were numerous cancellations and delays.

Window cleaner Howard Allenby, 36, from Leeds, and his girlfriend Natasha were among 20 passengers who slept on the floor of the Aurora International hotel near Heathrow after their flight to Zambia was cancelled for a second day.

Mr Allenby said: “The BA procedure is there’s no procedure. You get sent from pillar to post.” The airline said: “We are extremely sorry our customers have been experiencing so much frustration and inconvenience.”