BOSSES at Gatwick Airport have revealed the scale of the challenge they faced when re-opening the South Terminal last week.

The terminal, which had been closed for 18 months due to the pandemic, will see flights resume on Sunday but a video from YouTuber Tom Scott uncovered that the process of re-opening is a lot more complex than you might expect.

Mr Scott said: “In the same way that you are not meant to leave a car sitting unused for more than a couple of weeks, the mechanical parts in things like the baggage belts and jet bridges need to be run, tested and maintained regularly - or they may not start up ever again.”

Senior passenger operations manager at Gatwick Airport Pete Coombes told Mr Scott: “The scale of what we’ve been doing here, we’ve likened it to opening a smaller airport from scratch.”

Despite the closure of the terminal, some core services still had to be kept running, including maintenance and safety checks of power, water systems, airfield equipment and life safety systems.

While out of action, the South Terminal was used by film companies for television productions, with Mr Coombes explaining some will be broadcast “in the next few weeks”.

Mr Coombes said that, while the airport would normally see 900 take-offs and landings on a busy summer day, the airport was reduced to operating as few as two or three flights a day at the height of the pandemic.

The terminal’s re-opening comes after it was revealed that hundreds of ‘ghost’ flights took off from the airport during the pandemic, with 1,044 flights leaving empty or with less than ten per cent capacity between March 2020 and September 2021.

Airlines traditionally run such flights when they need to hit thresholds to use valuable take-off and landing slots and congested airports. Slot rules were suspended after the start of the pandemic at UK airports but were reintroduced at 50 per cent in October last year.

Gatwick Airport reported a loss of more than £350 million last year due to changing travel restrictions and the emergence of the Omicron variant.