IN AN Argus article covering the ongoing chaos at our airports that is ruining so many people's holidays, a spokesman for Wizz Air said that one of the reasons for it was a shortage of air traffic controllers, something which I find hard to understand.

Prior to the pandemic hitting our shores the airlines clearly had enough of them. If they hadn't there would have been all this disruption then, but there wasn't.

Planes took off and planes landed, the vast majority on time, and very few of them ever got cancelled, especially not at the very last minute when the passengers were on board and waiting to take off.

So what has happened to all these controllers that this airline claimed are missing?

Why on earth would they not return to their old jobs now that life is rapidly getting back to something like it was pre-pandemic?

What jobs have they found that pay anything like what they previously earned as air traffic controllers, a highly skilled task that requires a great degree of expertise and training?

After all, when you think about it, getting our planes on and off the ground is hardly a transferable skill. Aircraft don't operate anywhere other than airfields so the controllers have nowhere else to go in order to ply their trade other than places like Gatwick.

Or was this, as I suspect, just another excuse being used by an airline company to cover up its failure to provide the flights that its customers had paid for but who now found themselves stuck in airports all over the country and going nowhere fast?

It looks to me like yet another case of "it's not our fault, guv, it's someone else's".

Eric Waters

Lancing