I thank the Chairman and members of the committee for inviting the DAA and members of my team to address the committee. To begin, I will take this opportunity to address our passengers directly and to apologise unreservedly to everyone who was impacted by the challenges at Dublin Airport last weekend. That experience jars with our tradition of providing a positive passenger experience for our passengers. While the past number of weeks have been challenging, I fully appreciate that what our passengers experienced at the airport last weekend fell extremely short of our desired standards. I appreciate the anger, frustration and upset that this has caused. Put simply, we failed in our duty to our passengers and I offer my deep apologies to everyone impacted and, indeed, to Members of the Oireachtas, as I also recognise the reputational damage to our country, for which connectivity and ease of access are our lifeblood.
I also assure passengers who were affected by last weekend’s queues that they will not be left out of pocket. These challenges were not of passengers’ making in any way, and we will work closely with everyone impacted to make sure that they are not impacted financially. If passengers were affected by last weekend’s events, I ask them to complete the online form on our website at dublinairport.com or email customerexperience@dublinairport.com and we will ensure speedy recompense.
I also take a moment at the outset of today’s meeting to acknowledge the incredible efforts of all DAA’s employees, during what has been a hugely challenging time. Our people, and the members of the committee know this, are fiercely proud of our organisation. Their commitment and their efforts have been outstanding, particularly over recent weeks and months.
However, I appreciate that apologies are not what people are most interested in today. The committee and the public will be very keen to understand, and the Chairman asked me about this, first, exactly how these challenges have arisen and, second, the immediate steps we are taking as a business to address them and to ensure that last Sunday’s events will not be repeated. There are three factors which have led to the current situation, which I have outlined in detail in my statement.
I would like to briefly state the following for the record. The unexpectedly rapid rise in passenger numbers affecting the global aviation industry, the significant challenges in recruitment, particularly in security screening as a result of the new European Union's enhanced background checks and the absence due to Covid-19 at the start of the year combined had a significant impact on the business and created very significant queues for our passengers on 27 March, following which we implemented a significant work programme to address these challenges. First, since recruitment began in 2021, we have now recruited more than 300 new airport search unit officers, with 150 officers recruited since the end of April 2022 alone. We will bring another 70 officers on board over the coming weeks. The Dublin Airport Authority, DAA, has set no upward limit on recruitment numbers. However, given the absolute criticality of security training, the process of on-boarding these new staff cannot be rushed. While we are making significant progress, it will take us another month before we get the full complement of additional trained security officers deployed on the floor of the airport. We have deployed a company-wide task force of office-based staff and senior management. This includes more than 400 people, who have now worked over 2,000 shifts and over 8,500 hours in support of our front-line team. All of my team here have done multiple 3 a.m. starts in the airport over the previous months.
We have also introduced overtime and incentives for our security staff, secured additional external queue management resources and introduced a very wide range of process improvements, passenger experiences and communications initiatives. I wrote to you, Chairman, as recently as last Friday on the positive progress we have been achieving across a whole range of key areas, which have led to an improved service level. Until last weekend, 94% of all departing passengers travelling through the airport had cleared security in 45 minutes or less during May, while almost 80% had cleared security in 30 minutes or less. However, the fact remains that we have been, and are still, managing a resource gap as we pivot from losses of nearly €1 million per day and 1,000 redundancies during the Covid-19 pandemic, to a dramatic recovery of air travel which has been faster and earlier than anyone could have predicted.
In parallel with our substantial recruitment and resourcing up process, set to deliver a further increase in processing capacity this month and next month, we have been operating to a plan, albeit one that is predicated on very fine margins, and the Herculean efforts of our staff. Reflecting on last weekend, Friday saw a similar number of passengers as Sunday pass through Dublin Airport, and travel on Friday was without incident and without undue delay. On Sunday, that plan failed. Let me explain why and also why I have confidence in our updated plan.
On Sunday last, we had rostered and resourced staff to meet the demands of serving 50,000 departing passengers across both terminals one and two, with 200 security officers and a further 24 team supervisors and co-ordinators on duty. This would have allowed us to open sufficient security lanes and X-ray machines to cater for the first wave of departing passengers. However, on that day, we were 37 officers down. Some 17 of these officers were new recruits who were on our rostering system and it was anticipated they would have completed training to allow them to work last Sunday but, in fact, they had not yet been certified. This anomaly in our processes has since been resolved. Some 17 recruits were not there but who should have been there. It was a process issue and we have since fixed that. We also incurred a loss of 20 officers that were absent from work on that day.
Many of those 37 staff have particular clearances and certifications required to open and operate a lane. They cannot be readily substituted by other DAA staff. Without this capacity, we were unable to bring in substitute staff at short notice in the early hours of Sunday morning. This compounded the queueing problem throughout much of Sunday. The impact of this reduction in our anticipated team meant that we were unable to open six security lanes, three in each terminal, which was a loss of 30% capacity in the first wave. Each lane ordinarily screens about 200 passengers per hour and being down six lanes, we had a processing deficit of 1,200 passengers an hour. We were unable to achieve our anticipated productivity and this quickly led to queues forming in security. As more and more passengers joined the growing queues for the available security lanes, the situation became compounded. This led to a decision at 10.30 a.m. to advise those passengers queueing outside the terminal with flights departing before noon that they would not make their flights.
This leads me to what will be a very different bank holiday weekend and into the extremely busy summer months of June, July and August ahead. We are focusing on passenger experience improvements across three core areas, while also introducing new escalation and triage mechanisms in the event of any unanticipated issues arising. We have submitted a detailed plan to the committee that is focused on a better passenger experience around a number of key areas: maximising the availability of staff resources, increasing the number of security lanes open at peak times and improving queue management. There is a detailed plan which hopefully at a later stage in this session, I will be able to take the committee through.
