Originally Posted by
Suzeman
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The airlines have their own agreements with the Handling Agents (which the Airport is told is nothing to do with them) which presumably have some minimum service standards written in. Don't know if the Handling Agents have to pay the airlines if they don't meet them and I suppose you can argue that they can always change agents if there is consistent bad performance ...
But isn't that often a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire? Meanwhile the Airport is powerless to do anything, but always gets the rubbish thrown at them by the travelling public as "I had a c*ap experience at Manchester Airport".
My guess is that other airports are also having problems with de-icing this am. DUB seems to be particularly badly affected although it has been snowing on and off there since the early hours and I guess snow clearance of manoeuvring area is also a major issue.
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Except if MAG wanted they could centralise the de-icing under the airport's responsibility. This on of the examples were it is acknowledged that good operational cases can be made for removing the competition. That being said, they would still have to staff the facilities to meet the demand, which is difficult when you have very irregular snowfall from one year to the next. We get roughly the same amount each year, with some totals being more than others, but timing can vary by a few months. Not a problem in a place where they regularly get snowfall all winter.
Q: Since the de-icing is run by fewer companies do they contract with them directly or via the handling agents? Depending on the number of layers between the user and the provider they can end up almost unaccountable for failures.