Airline Emirates rejects airport's demand to cancel flights amid summer holiday chaos

An airline has rejected an order from a London airport to cancel flights to comply with a cap on passenger numbers as the aviation sector struggles to cope with increased travel demand. Emirates accused Heathrow Airport of showing “blatant disregard for consumers” by attempting to force it to “deny seats to tens of thousands of travellers” through the cap.

A Heathrow spokesperson said it would be “disappointing” if “any airline would want to put profit ahead of a safe and reliable passenger journey”. Virgin Atlantic also criticised the airport’s actions and claimed it was responsible for failures which are contributing to the chaos.

On Tuesday, Heathrow introduced a cap of 100,000 daily departing passengers until September 11 in an effort to avoid poor service levels. It pleaded with carriers to stop selling summer tickets to limit the disruption to passengers.

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British Airways announced it will cancel six additional daily short-haul flights over the next fortnight in response to the cap. It has already axed tens of thousands of flights this summer. Many passengers flying to and from the UK’s busiest airport have suffered severe disruption in recent months, with long queues and baggage system breakdowns.

Emirates, which operates six daily return flights between the airport and Dubai, accused the London airport of plucking the figure of the capacity cuts “out of thin air.” In a statement, it said: “Their communications not only dictated the specific flights on which we should throw out paying passengers, but also threatened legal action for non-compliance.

“This is entirely unreasonable and unacceptable, and we reject these