Dublin Airport Mayhem

yeah worth looking into that, never heard of it before, thanks

Ryanair have said over 1,500 of their passengers alone missed flights, so that DAA estimate is wildly under.

You think some of the management and directors would get off their holes.and role their sleeves up and get up there to help out! Not a chance.

Btw if I was the Greencore board I would put the appointment of Dalton Phillips on hold as clearly isn't fit to be a CEO of anything!

Kevin Cullinane is the spokesman/Head of Communications and was indeed pictured at the airport yesterday. However he is NOT on the Board - https://www.daa.ie/our-company/our-team/ - and the Board have been very conspicuous by their lack of visibility during this debacle, preferring instead to push Cullinane front and centre. I don't see any of them taking any personal responsibility at all? I wonder how much they are paid?

What we need to focus on is the decision by the DAA to offer 1000 redundancies early in the pandemic. This makes no sense unless the collapse in air travel was expected to be long-term. Any sensible person could see that this was nonsense. A furlough scheme could have retained liks with experienced staff instead of letting them go totally.

Will any politician or journalist hold DAA to account on this?

DAA's "wait and see" approach is working well.

What do people expect?

The DAA used the pandemic as a excuse to make a heap of staff redundant, now they are trying to get new staff on crap rates of Pay and hours and surprise surprise they cant get them. Maybe they can poach some of Keelings workers ( slaves) flying in from Bulgaria??/

When there is no accountability at director level for state owned entity f*ck ups then you can be sure that the DAA as a semi-state is certainly not going to see any repercussions. Quite the opposite, everyone at director level will be rewarded at the end of the year for a job well done. The strategy is always the same with these crowds, just weather the storm everything will be grand. Look at Peter Reid at the HSE, he's overseen controversy after controversy and has never been held accountable in any meaningful way. David McRedmond at An Post is another one, the handling of non-eu packages has been a disgrace since last Summer and is still going on, he's probably delighted the focus has shifted away from him.

I don’t believe Dublin airport is allowing flight transfers in this manner - at least it wasn’t for me flying from Kerry and then onwards. Each time they forced me to exit and join the massive queue again. Haven’t done this in over 6 weeks so maybe it changed but I doubt it.

The DAA is grossly incompetent. Aside from the screening and security issue there's also a lot of issues behind the doors too:

-- Staff screening is restricted now to a single area in T1. Used to be 2, one in arrivals other in departure, but it's just departures now... and staff are frequently late because everyone's crammed into that one area with often just 2 DAA workers screening it when it should be three (when a random check pings people are held up). Doesn't help that Flight crew (Emirates/Etihad worst culprits) that frequently act like it's their first time going through having to take off numerous articles with the metal detector constantly going off on them... 🙄

-- Construction work. This is a major one to those unawares; The main loading baggage hall belt (behind Belts 1-6) has been disassembled to set up a new system connecting between T1 and T2 so bags can go between without the need to having people drive them over between terminals. This has been going on for 2 years now... the issue is that literally all flights, besides Ryanair, in T1 are crammed down into a basement area (where belts 6-10 for arrivals are above) to be loaded. Flights such as KLM, Lufthansa, Air France, Qatar, Etihad, Turkish Airlines, some British Airways, Baltic Air, Icelandair, etc. to name but a few... ALL these bags are being funneled onto a SINGLE belt. Space is an issue too making for an unpleasant experience to work in. So it's no shocker that the belt is frequently jamming, tons of bags not coming down at all ending up in a chutes area where Ryanair is [OCS has to physically transport all these bags down to the basement area], resulting in a lot of bags missing their flights. I don't envy Baggage Tracing having to reflight and trace all those bags, there's piles of them all over the place. WHY the DAA hasn't sent some of these Airlines to T2 to alleviate some of the stress for both passengers and staff is beyond me... T2 is only used by Aerlingus and the few American flights, and Emirates, plenty of space there.

-- Staff issue for both Ramp and Baggage Hall. Aerlingus have went all out hiring people, and they've poached a LOT of agents from both Sky Handling and Swissport, as such both Sky Handling and Swissport are struggling... Swissport more so. Frequently there's no one loading bags, and the above aforementioned issue, the belts are overflowing with bags creating jams and backlogs resulting in bags missing their flights.

So yeah... got through Check-in, security and finally at your Gate? Just hope your bags make it! 😛

Honestly I'd just fly with Aerlingus with the current state of the Airport, they're well staffed to make things go smoothly.

120 Passengers missed their flight yesterday for Zurich, but Tuesday's typically the 'quietest' day of the week.

Flying to Spain on Friday with 2 young kids

- Anyone know what's the earliest than Ryanair will allow bags to be checked in?

- is there any point in getting fast track. Hearing conflicting views if it's worthwhile or not!

- if I go to checknin bags and others join security queue, has it been possible to skip up queue.to rest of family

Thanks!