Heathrow Airport has told airlines to stop selling summer tickets and has placed a passenger cap from today until September 

Heathrow has told airlines to stop selling summer tickets. The airport has also imposed a cap on the number of passengers able to fly each day.A new daily limit of 100,000 passengers will be in place from today until September 18th

.This news comes after thousands of people have had their flights cancelled due to the staff shortages caused by the pandemic.While airports and airlines have been trying to recruit more staff, it has proved to be a struggle as there are still many shortages and passenger flights affected.The Heathrow chief executive said in a statement:

"On average only about 1,500 of these 4,000 daily seats have currently been sold to passengers, and so we are asking our airline partners to stop selling summer tickets to limit the impact on passengers."He added: "By making this intervention now, our objective is to protect flights for the vast majority of passengers at Heathrow this summer and to give confidence that everyone who does travel through the airport will have a safe and reliable journey and arrive at their destination with their bags.

"We recognise that this will mean some summer journeys will either be moved to another day, another airport or be cancelled and we apologise to those whose travel plans are affected."The chief continued: "Our colleagues are going above and beyond to get as many passengers away as possible, but we cannot put them at risk for their own safety and wellbeing."