Passengers face five-hour queues at Heathrow Airport AGAIN because of passport e-gate fail
HEATHROW Airport passengers once again faced huge queues this morning after the e-gates at the border broke down.
Travellers at Terminal 5 posted images of long queues on social media while others were being held on planes due to the congestion.
George Zarkadakis, who arrived at Heathrow this morning, wrote on Twitter: "System for scanning passports is down (again). Expected time of waiting for arriving passengers: 2-4 hours."
Another said: "#Heathrow is at it again… 3,000 person queue to even enter the arrivals hall at #terminal5."
Rolando Estrada tweeted: Absolute chaos at Heathrow immigration lines. Could be at least 5 hrs."
Someone else asked: "Do e-gates at @HeathrowAirport ever actually work? Probably 1,000+ people queueing to get through passport control."
Passenger Thomas de Lucy tweeted: "Not only are we waiting for two hours at passport control but Heathrow staff are all incredibly rude, shouting at people and ignoring others.
"Maybe a supervisor should be on hand to control staff behaviour."
E-gates - managed by Border Force - allow travellers with biometric passports to pass through border control without a manual inspection.
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There are currently approximately 270 e-gates across the UK which allow faster travel across the border.
Heathrow Airport wrote on Twitter: "We're aware of an issue impacting the e-gates, which are staffed and operated by Border Force.
"We apologise for the impact this is having on your journey. Our teams are working closely with Border Force to resolve this as quickly as possible."
A Home Office spokeswoman said: "This morning a technical issue affected e-gates at a number of ports. The issue was quickly identified and has now been resolved.
"We have been working hard to minimise disruption and continue to monitor the situation closely. We apologise to all passengers for the inconvenience caused."
TECHNICAL ISSUE
The problems come just weeks after the e-gates stopped working across Heathrow, Manchester and Edinburgh, resulting in five hour queues and people even fainting.
However, travellers have seen huge queues at UK airports since the summer, as other problems included a lack of Border staff and more Covid travel checks being required.
An increase in travellers has also put the airports under more pressure.
Sun-starved British families flocked to airports earlier this week following major changes to the travel rules which has seen the green and amber lists scrapped.
Holiday bookings rocketed to three times the normal rate in a mad scramble to nab getaways after the amber list and expensive PCR tests were scrapped.
