I’m delighted to invite you to a EUROCONTROL Aviation StraightTalk Live on Wednesday 14 April, 11:00-11:45 CET, in which we’ll be touching base with John Holland-Kaye, CEO of Heathrow Airport.

As the head of Europe’s busiest airport pre-pandemic in terms of passengers, and fourth busiest in terms of movements, John’s take on the crisis, and when he believes the recovery will pick up, will make essential viewing in the 22^nd edition of our flagship business briefing with aviation’s key players.

John is an enormously experienced airport leader who has been in senior roles at Heathrow since 2009, and its CEO since 2014. In that time he’s successfully kept the airport at the top of the European passenger league, driving the creation of the rebooted Terminal 2, and working hard to make the case for increasing capacity via the third runway project.

But COVID has massively impacted airports around the globe. Heathrow has been particularly badly hit by plunging passenger volumes – closing out 2020 73% down on 2019, with just 22.1 million passengers compared with 2019’s record total of 80.1 million. That’s forced John to take drastic action, from closing terminals and moving to single runway operations, to exploring ways to support jobs and restore confidence via robust health and safety measures.

Against a backdrop of travel bans, tests and quarantines, and uneven progress globally with vaccine rollouts, in this Aviation StraightTalk we’ll be exploring the massive challenges that Heathrow and other airports face to stay afloat – as well as the opportunities there are to ‘build back better’ and more sustainably.

I will provide a very quick market update at the start of this webinar, with Andrew Charlton, journalist and Aviation Advocacy Managing Director, conducting the interview.

Source: EuroControl