As chaos engulfed airports across the UK this week, one “hero” passenger stepped in to help dozens of customers at Gatwick.
Kurtis Toy, 36, had seen “overwhelmed” easyJet customer service staff left to deal with the fallout of a technical glitch that caused mass cancellations and delays on Tuesday.
The cyber security expert offered to step in and become a “human megaphone” to help workers struggling to relay information to the large crowd of passengers.
He could not take his flight from Gatwick to Aberdeen and was one of at least 300,000 people impacted after National Air Traffic Services (Nats) issued an alert over a “technical issue”.
Footage shared on TikTok shows Mr Toy bellowing out updates to the crowd. He said: “Everyone listen up for a second please. If your flight currently says cancelled, and it’s not one of the ones I’ve read out, we don’t know which gate to go to for you to get your luggage back.
“The problem is obviously for security reasons, you need to be escorted out of the airport but they’re trying to organise it for everyone who’s been cancelled or not, so there’s a list coming in very, very slowly of where to go for which cancellation.”
Joy Matashi, who shared the clip, wrote: “Shoutout to this hero passenger who volunteered to help the understaffed easyJet team at Gatwick.”
Around 2,163 flights were affected by the glitch in the third major incident caused by a Nats system failure in the last three years.
Its chief executive has been asked to provide a report after being summoned to see transport secretary Heidi Alexander on Wednesday to account for the disruption.
Mr Toy told Metro: “There were people who were hard of hearing and there was no megaphone. Everyone was shouting questions at them ‘Where do we go? How long do we have to wait?’ and the boards aren’t updating.
“The workers were clearly exasperated and frustrated because they didn’t have any information either. They had to phone to get the list of definitely cancelled flights.
“They were doing remarkably well but just weren’t very loud. I heard what one member of staff had said, but the other person on the other side did not. So I just shouted it out. She tried to say thank you, and I said, ‘Look, I have a very loud voice, and I really don’t have a problem with shouting to people’.
“She was reluctant, and I was like, ‘You guys can crack on with getting the info, and then I can just call it out for you – if that would help’.
He told the newspaper that after reading out the first lot of updates, he got a round of applause from the crowd, and decided to continue.
Mr Toy said one passenger fetched him a bottle of water and a KitKat after his throat started becoming hoarse.
He said the staff hugged him before he left and thanked him for his help.
Asked if he felt like a hero, he said: “Not at all, it is daft to be called a hero for shouting orders at people, it was just loud customer service, nothing more than that.
“I will have ‘can you please go to Gate 559’ going round my head for the rest of my life now.”
