A damning reporting into the ‘failings’ of the Teesside Airshow has been published after the event descended into chaos, leaving thousands of ticketholders stuck in queues of traffic unable to reach the airfield.

The airshow, which was held on Saturday June 11, had been postponed from 2020 after the Covid pandemic forced it to be put back but left many visitors wishing it hadn’t gone ahead when roads around Teesside Airport became gridlocked.

The scathing report into what went wrong with the event’s traffic management plans was published this morning (Tuesday, June 28) slamming the plans, saying there were a number of lessons to be learned and that it is ‘very unlikely’ Teesside Airport will host another airshow.

It identified ‘various failings’ including ‘infrequent and disparate’ planning meetings, traffic management staff being ‘unprepared’ and plans which were ‘not detailed enough’.

Read more: Teesside Airshow 'unlikely to happen again' after damning report

Organisers held just one full meeting of the Public Event Safety Advisory Group (PESAG) set up to arrange the airshow more than three months before the event took place, on March 9, to sign off on the plans based on the 2016 airshow.

The company put in charge of traffic management, Hatton Traffic Management LTD, was not invited to this meeting or even made aware it was taking place.

The report concluded that ‘meetings on event planning and implementation were infrequent and disparate’ and said that more meetings should have taken place.

According to the report, traffic management plans ‘should have taken more note of the fact that access to the airport is effectively through one key road junction’.

It was also decided in the March 9 meeting that there would be no public transport and traffic management staff would be told to ‘keep the traffic flowing’. One Darlington Borough Council representative pointed out that arrows on the traffic management plans were pointing in the wrong direction at the time.

Those at the March 9 meeting also heard that Arriva, which operates bus services in the area, had not been contacted about the event.

They were also reminded that the national terror threat level remained substantial. The event management plan to deal with suspicious packages said 'as with bomb threats, the police will be responsible for the co-ordination of the response', however the police were not due to be in attendance.

Read more: Teesside Airshow: How to get a refund after traffic chaos

On the day just five traffic staff were working despite planning documents produced before the event saying that 12 stewards would be needed to look after the car parks alone.

Some members of the public said that traffic management staff sat in their vehicles rather than actively trying to manage the traffic.

The report also alleges that Hatton Traffic Management Ltd was aware that it could take up to four hours to process all the cars wanting to enter the car park if everyone arrived within a short space of time, based on the number of vehicle bookings.

The Northern Echo has contacted Hatton Traffic Management for a comment.

There were no plans in place for police to attend the event despite over 20,000 people being expected to attend.

Earlier this month The Echo revealed it understood that Durham Police did not believe the airshow required a similar response to other large-scale events such as Durham Miners’ Gala.

The report says that the planning group should have also included Cleveland Police and that ‘joined up working between the forces could have benefitted the planning process and capacity issues experienced by Durham Police on the day’.

Read more: Teesside Airshow: Read the damning report in full

Organisers SkyLive have now announced how disgruntled ticketholders can get a refund if they were unable to make it into the event.

Anyone who couldn’t attend must post their unused tickets to SkyLive and include a stamped return envelope which they must pay for themselves.

Read more: Teesside Airshow: Only FIVE traffic staff for 7,500 cars

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