Flights resume from Southend Airport today
The first flight will be to Malaga
Last updated 1st May 2022
Flights begin taking off from London Southend Airport for the first time since last Summer today, marking the start of what airport bosses hope will be a busy Summer season.
Glyn Jones, CEO of Southend Airport, says he's very excited to welcome holidaymakers back to the airport: "It's great news for everyone, not just for London Southend.
"We've suffered along with everyone else for the last two years, it's been really, really difficult and it's fantastic to welcome back our Easyjet friends and our guests back."
The first flight took off early on Sunday morning to Malaga, with other routes to areas in Spain and Portugal available.
He says they've had lots of interest in their routes: "The first flights are pretty busy and we know that the level of underlying demand for flying is very high.
"People haven't been able to really plan and take their holidays seamlessly for quite a long time, so we've got plenty of interest."
Glyn's also expecting this interest to increase as we get closer to the summer holidays: "As people get a little bit more confidence going through the various processes they've got to go through for some countries during arrival, and understand they haven't got to pay for a PCR test coming back in to the country, which has been quite a big deal for families, I think people will get a lot more confident and we'll see things build nicely through the summer."
Glyn recently told us they're well equipped to avoid travellers seeing a repeat of the recent long queues and flight cancellations seen at airports around the country over the Easter holidays: "One of the things we were able to do because we didn't have any passengers flying in the winter was make sure that our staff are properly trained.
"We spent a lot of time and effort making sure that people are ready to do their jobs, so people are fully aware of how things work and what they need to do.
"We've also been recruiting in a number of areas including traffic control, engineering, cleaning, in the fire service and security, and we've made sure those people have gone through all their preliminary training and security measures to ensure that we're absolutely to ready to hit the ground running on the 1st of May."
He also suggested they're planning to expand and offer more routes soon as part of their post-covid recovery: "It's been an extraordinarily difficult couple of years for the industry and I'm absolutely delighted to be welcoming our friends from EasyJet back. This is the start of what I'm quite sure will be significant development in the years to come."