Manchester Airport chief, Karen Smart, has stepped down amid ongoing passenger chaos.
The airport chief has been with the business for the past eight years and took over the managing director role at the start of the pandemic to help Manchester Airports Group through the impact of Covid.
The group, which owns Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands airports, confirmed this afternoon that she had decided to leave the business, Manchester Evening News reports.
But in a statement, Manchester Airport said she had decided to return to the south of England, where her family is based, to "pursue fresh career opportunities".
MAG has also announced that Ian Costigan will take on the role of Interim Managing Director and will be in charge of the recruitment drive said to be at the heart of solving the ongoing issues ahead of the summer.
MAG CEO Charlie Cornish said: “Over the last two years, Karen has guided Manchester Airport through the most challenging period of its 84-year history, having made a major contribution to MAG throughout her time with the business.
“I am sorry to lose Karen after her years of valuable service, but also understand her desire to return to the South for family reasons and indeed to explore new career opportunities.
“While there are sure to be further challenges ahead, I am confident we will soon start to see the benefits of the recovery plans Karen has helped put in place and look forward to working with Ian and his leadership team to drive them forward.”
This comes after passengers were greeted by "nightmare" chaos at the Manchester airport this morning.
Passengers said they arrived to “scary” queues and “chaos” caused by ongoing staff shortages.
Recent weeks have seen the airport plagued by huge queues at both check-in and security, as well as massive delays and issues on baggage claim for arrivals.
Today was no different, with passengers sharing more photos of lines snaking out of the terminal buildings and into the car park in the early hours of this morning.
Some people reported facing hours of waits and even missing out on their flights.
Airport bosses previously said that the delays were down to staffing shortages and recruitment issues being experienced by the entire industry.
They said the airport was trying to catch up as international travel slowly begins to return back to normal, amid the ongoing Covid pandemic.
The airport had made a number of people redundant over the pandemic.
Travellers were left furious though, describing the scene as “chaotic” and “scary”.
One airport worker even quit in disgust over the way it was being run.
Ray Ellis, 54, said he has resigned in protest over what he called 'chaotic operations' - and said he fears for the security of passengers.
A traveller called Matt tweeted the airport directly saying: "This is an absolute disgrace. It’s 10 past 6 and security are already acknowledging that the security nightmares are going to make people miss flights this morning."
Robert Whittaker said it was 'peak chaos' and that it took him over two hours to get through security at Terminal 2.
"I recommend turning up AT LEAST 3 hours before your flight," he said.
One passenger, posting on the Twitter account Cheshire Dyslexia Testing said: "Scary queues for security snaking into the car park when we arrived at 05:50 for 08:15 flight T1 but Fast Track queue much shorter, moving fast and we got through in 40 mins.
"Very glad I pre-ordered Fast-Track two weeks ago. People in normal queue 2-3hrs."
