Flight cancellations and airport chaos are killing off our dream post-Covid travel plans

Instead, we have tarpaulin covers outside Terminal 1, snaking queue-lane tape, overflowing toilets, booked-out car parks and heaps of unclaimed baggage.

Clearly, many of the problems that afflicted our showpiece airport were outside the scope of a functioning airport management.

The airport got its figures wrong, but so did the service firms and many airlines. The regulation of airside passes changed. The upskilling and security clearance of new staff took longer than anticipated. A private car park failed to reopen. And then came the cancelled flights of June’s end.

Cancelled flights fall into three categories. There are the ones that airlines like, the early-warning cancellations, that happen two weeks before the aircraft is scheduled to fly, safely outside EU compensation terms and the bonfires of social media. They happen when the number crunchers look at passenger bookings and, nowadays, staff rostering and realise a flight no longer makes financial or logistical sense.

There have been a disproportionate number of those in recent weeks, as airlines saw the looming crisis ahead, but because they never make it to the departure board, they are silent casualties of the crisis.

Other flights are cancelled the night before, quietly announced with a silent volley of texts and emails to passengers and a red banner on an airport screen, when staff cry off at short notice, an aircraft has technical problems or, increasingly, instructions come from airport or airspace traffic controllers to reduce the number of flights.

Discomfiting as these cancellations are, the cancellations that happen at very short notice – within six hours of scheduled take off – are the biggest problem of all, when Covid-struck staff cry off and replacements cannot be found.

They upset passengers and end up being screamed on social media. It is harder to reschedule passengers and find accommodation when notice is short.

At the time of writing, 27pc of the cancellations over the previous week at Dublin Airport were very short-term cancellations.

In some cases, passengers who struggled through the security queue were told to retrieve their bags and go back to the land side of the airport.

The emphasis on cancellations does not mean security queue delays have faded into the apron.

This week they continued to peak at 60 minutes. Intermittently this happened at unexpected times, the low-intensity afternoons rather than the high-intensity 6am-8.30am period.

Despite this, it is unlikely we will see the Army deployed at the airport. They are to be trained to deal with security points at remote gates, dealing with airport staff rather than passengers.

Should it happen, this will release 100 trained security personnel to work in the terminal. But with 30 new staff a week now arriving in the security team, their deployment is unnecessary.

Getting through Dublin Airport will remain uncomfortable and stressful, but passengers are less and less likely to miss flights with the arrival of each week’s 30 recruits to the team.

A greater danger to our holiday experience lies in the systemic problems within the industry, shared alike by airlines, airports and supply companies.

British Airways trimmed 10pc of its schedule in early May. EasyJet tried to muddle through, ran into problems and ended up cancelling 700 flights at the weekend. A further 10,000 flights have been dropped from its summer schedule.

Lufthansa is cancelling 2,200 flights in July and August at Frankfurt and Munich.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a US Transportation Department Study indicates the number of cancelled flights is up 44pc on 2019.

Airports everywhere are straining.