Flights resume at Gatwick, but stark warning for passengers

Flights resumed at Gatwick shortly after 6am this morning, but the airport is warning that not all of today’s scheduled 765 flights will depart and passengers are still being advised to check the status of their service before leaving home.

Around 100 flights were cancelled this morning and further cancellations and delays are expected throughout today.

Some 126,000 passengers were hit by yesterday’s forced cancellations after the runway was closed following more than 50 sightings of at least one drone over the airfield.

The drone or drones have not been brought down and the operator, who faces up to five years in prison, has not yet been caught, but police said this morning that the airport was ‘better prepared now’ to deal with further drone sightings.

Sussex Police assistant chief constable Steve Barry told BBC Breakfast TV that he was ‘confident’ the ariport had ‘everything it could possibly have’.

"The key is we now have some options around the airport, there are a range of options, some of them very sophisticated, some less sophisticated, to respond to drone sightings," he said.

Gatwick’s runway remained closed from around 9pm on Wednesday evening after two staff first spotted a drone close to the airfield, aside from a short period when flights restarted in the early hours of Thursday, only to be halted again after the drone reappeared close to the runway.

The last confirmed sighting was just before 10pm yesterday.

The runway reopened at just after 6am today, with China Eastern the first flight landing at Gatwick at 6.13 am this morning. The first flight to depart was to Lapland.

It is understood that passengers due to travel today will be allocated seats before those whose flights yesterday were cancelled or delayed so airlines can avoid further backlogs, but the airport has said only ‘a limited’ number of flights will operate. Some departing flights have been diverted to other airports, including Luton.

Stranded passengers aren’t entitled to compensation, but under EU law airlines must refund or re-route affected passengers and provide adequate refreshments and accommodation, where necessary. Those whose airlines haven’t provided care are being advised to make their own arrangements, keep receipts and request refunds from their airlines.

Yesterday, British Airways was one of the airlines to pro-actively offer passengers due to travel today the option to cancel or delay flights in an attempt to limit disruption during what was expected to be one of the airport’s busiest days of the year.

Transport secretary Chris Grayling said ‘a number of measures’ have been introduced, some of them by the military who were drafted into the airport late yesterday, to give passengers confidence that flights could operate safely from Gatwick.

When asked why these measures had not been introduced prior to the drone attack at Gatwick, he said the technology to prevent such an incident was ‘only just emerging’.

Campaign group Communities Against Gatwick Noise and Emissions described the closure of Gatwick as an ‘early Christmas present’ for local residents, who, it said: woke to silence from the airport on 20th December, ‘offering a glimpse of the tranquillity that they use to enjoy before Gatwick introduced concentrated flight paths (2013-14) and increased the number of aircraft movements’. However, it said it did not condone the ‘irresponsible behaviour of flying drones near an airport’.