‘Really difficult situation’, says travel journalist Simon Calderpublished at 12:21 Greenwich Mean Time
Travel journalist Simon Calder tells the BBC that London Gatwick is “the UK’s second busiest airport, and today there would be around 100,000 passengers flying in and out”.
About half of those passengers would be using the south terminal, he says.
“This morning, someone passing through the security check had an item which raised very serious security concerns,” he continues.
As a result of that, the entire South Terminal “land side” – the area in the airport before the security check – was closed, and that includes the railway station which is built into the south terminal.
Airlines using the south terminal include British Airways, Veuling Airlines of Spain, Hungarian airline WizzAir, Air Malta, and RyanAir and many others. Easyjest has a small presence there, he says, but mainly uses the North Terminal.
Calder continues: “Flights are still landing. But if they are landing at the South Terminal, people are going to the gate as normal, but then they are not getting out on the air bridge and walking out into international arrivals, they are being put on busses to the north terminal to be processed there.”
“That will mean lots of crowd building up,” he says, “and they can’t leave the North Terminal to go to the station.
“And so you have this very, very difficult situation of thousands of people waiting outside South Terminal waiting for their flights and thousands leaving the North Terminal, not really sure how they are going to move on.”