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Several hundred travellers missed their flights at Schiphol Airport on Sunday after the automated passport-control gates failed for most of the day. Every passenger had to be checked by hand during one of the busiest travel weekends of the autumn.
What happened
The disruption started around 6 am, when all 78 of the airport’s electronic passport gates, called e-gates, stopped working. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee, the border police in charge of passport control, said the cause was an IT failure. Officials made it clear that it was not a cyberattack.
With the automated gates down, every traveller had to be checked by hand at the desks. The Marechaussee brought in extra staff to cover all the booths and made manual checks as quick as possible to keep things moving, but long lines still formed in both the arrival and departure halls. Passengers waited about an hour on average, with some standing in line for up to an hour and a half or more. The timing made things worse because it was the Sunday of the autumn half-term holiday, when Schiphol was already expecting larger-than-usual crowds.
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The impact
Schiphol reported that several hundred people missed their flights because of the problem. KLM said it waited as long as possible before departing to take as many affected passengers as it could, and rebooked those who still missed their flights onto the next available service. Transavia said it would be “extra lenient” with rebookings. The system was fixed after about ten hours, and the airport said things were back to normal from around 3:30 pm.
For those affected, the experience was stressful and confusing. One traveller arriving from Rome with her daughter, who missed a connecting flight, told De Telegraaf there had been “no water, no information,” and that passengers “had absolutely no idea what was going on.”
A difficult stretch for Schiphol
The passport-control failure is the latest in a series of disruptions and changes at the Netherlands’ main airport. Just a few days earlier, on 12 October, a large fire in a warehouse in nearby Aalsmeer sent thick smoke toward the airport, forcing air-traffic control to close the Buitenveldert runway for several hours. The other runways stayed open, and no injuries were reported. Earlier this month, a power failure also disrupted train services to and from the airport for hours.
Besides these recent incidents, Schiphol is facing new limits. For the first time in eighteen years, the government has set a cap on the airport, allowing 478,000 flights a year, with no more than 27,000 at night. This is down from the previous limit of about 499,000. The goal is to reduce noise, with the government aiming for 20 percent fewer people seriously affected by noise during the day and at least 15 percent fewer at night. In reality, Schiphol is already operating below this cap. The slot coordinator expects the airport to finish the year with about 466,000 flights.
What it means for travellers
Sunday’s outage shows that the biggest delays at an airport are not always caused by the flights themselves. The new flight cap only limits the number of take-offs and landings, not the crowds at security or passport control, so it will not change queue times. For travellers, the main lesson from the weekend is a familiar one: during busy holiday periods, allow extra time, because a technical problem in a key system like passport control can quickly lead to missed flights.