British Government, Regulators Tell Airlines to Cancel Flights

The government and airline regulators in Great Britain are taking the extraordinary – but not unprecedented – step of telling airlines to cancel scheduled flights for this summer if they won’t be able to fulfill them.

According to a story by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), officials want to avoid the same kind of chaos that engulfed British airports and airlines earlier this spring, resulting in numerous delays and cancellations and stranded travelers.

In a joint letter from the Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority, regulators wrote to airlines and advised them to review summer plans now and take appropriate actions if they don’t think they can deliver in the future.

“We think it’s important that each airline reviews afresh its plans for the remainder of the summer season until the end of September to develop a schedule that is deliverable. Your schedules must be based on the resources you and your contractors expect to have available, and should be resilient for the unplanned and inevitable operational challenges that you will face,” according to the letter sent on Tuesday. “While cancellations at any time are a regrettable inconvenience to passengers, it is our view that cancellations at the earliest possibility to deliver a more robust schedule are better for consumers than late notice on-the-day cancellations.”

It is not known if international flights are included in the request. Now that the Biden Administration has lifted its COVID-19 pre-departure testing in order to enter the U.S., the amount of trans-Atlantic flights are expected to increase.

While many airlines worldwide have cut back their summer schedules voluntarily to deal with pilot and staffing shortages, being asked to do so by the government is a unique request. But it wouldn’t be the first time.

In May of this year, officials at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport asked airlines – particularly Dutch national carrier KLM – to reduce the number of local departing passengers and not accept new bookings from for a week to ease congestion.

Airport regulators called it “an annoying but necessary measure to reduce the number of passengers.”