"Pearson airport is hell on earth."
So declared
The one-time
"I am so in shock at this place. It is the biggest disgrace known to man," he told his 414,300 Twitter followers in a selfie video from the gate.
"I’m gonna have a viral meltdown."
Scenes of endless security and customs queues at large Canadian airports — and Pearson in particular — have played out all spring, with peak travel season weeks away. While the federal government has pledged to cancel random COVID-19 testing at customs and hire hundreds more customs and security screening officers, hurdles ranging from staffing shortages to tarmac delays threaten to cascade into a problem that overmatches efforts to drain clogged terminals.
"I think it's just going to get worse," former Air Canada chief operating officer
"The only thing consistent that's happened at Canadian airports for two months now is there have been delays."
Nearly half a million passengers were held up after arriving on international flights at
In total, some 2,700 flights arriving from outside the country were delayed at Pearson last month, versus four planes — and a few hundred passengers — in
And passenger volume is only likely to increase, with the summer holidays about to kick off and
On Friday, the federal government announced it would suspend randomized COVID-19 tests of vaccinated passengers starting Saturday until at least
The announcement came hours after chief public health officer Dr.
Three in 100 tests remain positive, she said.
Passenger numbers still trail pre-pandemic levels, but Canadians' travel spending — on airline, travel agency and car rental bookings — have topped 2019 levels since mid-March, RBC chief economist
Airlines are not configured to deal with the ensuing hours-long security and customs delays, Dee said.
"That crew that was scheduled to operate your flight? They’re out of duty time because the flight they operated this morning was held off gate for two hours," he wrote on Twitter, referring to regulatory limits on hours worked by flight crews within one-day and four-week periods.
"That aircraft that was scheduled to operate your morning flight? Sorry, it missed its scheduled maintenance last night because it couldn’t offload its passengers on time because the customs hall was full."
Meanwhile a flight missed due to a long security queue or delayed connecting flight may take six hours to rebook — as in Whitney's case — since agents slated to cover the customer service counter are still working to board passengers on a different delayed plane. Similar snags confront baggage handlers.
"It just cascades," said
"The watchword for the summer is patience."
"These days, airlines are facing the double whammy of a shortage of pilots, flight attendants and ground handlers and then lumpy demand on their network," said Cirium spokesman
"Some planes are full, and some are not." Partially booked flights may be nixed in order to funnel passengers onto other planes and boost efficiency.
"And then they said they had a flight attendant, but now they didn't have a pilot, so they were flying in a pilot from
After disembarking from the first
"It was very frustrating."
But the hiring process takes time, with clearance from one of CATSA's three subcontractors and an RCMP criminal background check required, on top of clearance from the local airport authority and
There are also different levels of security clearance, with a "relaxed" clearance allowing the agent to check boarding passes and a tougher-to-obtain full clearance permitting actual screening of luggage, said
An additional transborder security clearance makes it harder to staff checkpoints on international flights, adding to their typically longer wait times.
“It’s like rewiring a house while still living in it," she said. "It’s going to take months to a year."
This report by
Companies in this story: (TSX:AC)
— With files from
© 2022 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved., source