In short: Airport assistance is now used by a record 5.9 million passengers a year at UK airports, and the CAA grades every large airport partly on how accurately it records waiting times. That record depends on agents' handhelds staying connected from the car park help point to the aircraft door, and on the apron and remote stands they usually do not.
Key Takeaways
- Demand has outrun the airport — Assistance requests at UK airports rose 115.8% between 2015 and 2025 while overall passenger numbers rose 23.9%, according to the CAA.
- The rating depends on the timestamp — The CAA framework scores waiting times and the accuracy and robustness of the data behind them, so a job closed late on paper reads as a passenger left waiting.
- The weak links sit outside the terminal — Car park help points, remote stands, ambulifts and airside roads fall outside terminal Wi-Fi, which is where agents lose dispatch, tracking and the handover record.
In a nutshell
What is airport assistance, and who is responsible for it?
Airport assistance is the free service that helps disabled passengers and passengers with reduced mobility (PRM) get from arrival at the airport to their seat on the aircraft, and back again on the way home. It covers help from a car park or drop-off help point, assistance through check-in and security, wheelchairs and buggies through the terminal, boarding by jet bridge, ambulift or steps, and the reverse journey on arrival, through passport control and baggage reclaim to onward transport.
In the UK the legal basis is Regulation (EC) 1107/2006, retained in UK law after Brexit. It places responsibility for the service on the airport managing body, not on the airline. Airlines pass on pre-notified requests, the airport recovers its costs through a per-passenger PRM charge levied on every airline using the airport, and the airport either runs the service itself or, more commonly, contracts it to a specialist provider. That split matters later, because the people delivering the service are often a contractor's staff working on the airport's network, with the airline's data, at an aircraft stand operated by a ground handler.
How is airport assistance performance measured in the UK?
The Civil Aviation Authority assesses every UK airport handling more than 150,000 passengers a year under its Airport Accessibility Performance Framework, introduced in 2014. Its 2025/26 report (CAP3264), published on 4 August 2026, covers 28 airports and rates each on three things: (i) performance against waiting-time targets for arriving and departing passengers, including the accuracy and robustness of the data collected; (ii) a satisfaction survey of people who used the service; and (iii) consultation with disabled people and organisations through each airport's accessibility forum.
The headline results are good. Nineteen airports, including Manchester, Gatwick, Edinburgh, Bristol and Newcastle, were rated "very good", and the other nine, including Heathrow, Stansted, Birmingham and Glasgow, were rated "good". No airport was rated "needs improvement" or "poor", against thirteen in those two categories when the framework started. The CAA also observed assistance on around 1,400 flights at 16 of the largest airports during the year.
The same report carries the warning. Requests for assistance have grown 115.8% since 2015, compared with overall passenger growth of 23.9%, and a record 5.9 million passengers used assistance services in 2025. The CAA's Aviation Consumer Survey found 82% satisfaction among passengers with accessibility or disability needs, against 88% for passengers overall, and 58% of disabled consumers reported difficulties using airports or flying. Anna Bowles, the CAA's Head of Consumer Protection, said the regulator will consult on a revised framework later this year, and the Civil Aviation Bill now before Parliament would give the CAA stronger enforcement powers over passenger rights, accessibility included.
An airport that is "good" today is running a service whose volume roughly doubles every decade, under a framework that is about to be revised, with a regulator that is asking for more teeth.
Where does the airport assistance journey break down?
It breaks down at the handovers, and most of the handovers happen in places the terminal network was never designed to reach.
Follow a single departing passenger who uses a wheelchair and has booked assistance. They press a help point in a multi-storey car park, which needs a working connection to a dispatcher. An agent is tasked on a handheld, collects them, and logs the pickup. They go through check-in and a fast-track security lane, which is well covered. At the gate, if the aircraft is on a contact stand, they board by jet bridge. If it is on a remote stand, as it often is for low-cost carriers at Stansted, Luton or Manchester, they transfer to an ambulift, a high-loader vehicle that drives across the apron and raises a cabin to the aircraft door. The ambulift crew logs the transfer, boards the passenger, and closes the job.
Every one of those steps generates a timestamp, and the CAA's waiting-time targets are calculated from them. On arrival the most scrutinised figure is how long a passenger waits at the aircraft door after everyone else has left, and that figure comes from the moment the agent or ambulift crew records reaching the aircraft. If the handheld has no signal on a remote stand, the crew records it later, from memory, or on paper. Self-reported waiting times are only as good as the moment they are captured, which is why the CAA assesses the accuracy and robustness of data collection alongside the times themselves.
The weak spots tend to recur from one airport to the next:
- Car parks and drop-off zones, where help points and pickup requests start, often on a separate network from the terminal or on a public mobile signal that is weak inside concrete multi-storeys.
- Remote stands and the apron, which terminal Wi-Fi does not cover and which public mobile networks cover unevenly, especially at the far end of a long stand row.
- Ambulifts and buggies on airside roads, which move between coverage zones and need to stay visible to the dispatcher throughout.
- Baggage reclaim and immigration halls at peak, where staff devices compete with thousands of passenger phones on the same congested macro or in-building cells.
Why doesn't terminal Wi-Fi fix it?
Terminal Wi-Fi is built for passengers indoors, and it does that job reasonably well. It was not designed to follow a vehicle across an apron or to give a staff device priority over a full departure lounge.
There are three specific problems. Firstly, coverage stops at the building line, and the assistance journey does not, so the agent's handheld roams onto a public mobile network at exactly the point the job becomes time-critical. Secondly, Wi-Fi handover between access points is slow enough that a moving buggy or a handheld being carried at walking pace through a long pier will drop sessions; the dispatch app reconnects, but the location trace has gaps. Thirdly, at peak the radio channel is shared with every passenger device in range, and a staff device has no guaranteed share of it. We covered the passenger side of that problem in our piece on why airport Wi-Fi buckles at the gate; the assistance team inherits the same congestion with far less tolerance for it.
Public mobile networks fill some of the gap, and for many airports they are the honest default. The trade-off is that the airport has no control over coverage on its own apron, no priority for its own staff at peak, and no single view of which devices are connected where. TETRA and other two-way radio systems remain the backbone for voice on most airfields and work well for it, but they carry very little data, so they cannot move the timestamps, location traces and passenger records the dispatch system depends on.
What does a private 5G network change for airport assistance?
A private 5G network gives the airport its own licensed coverage across the terminal, the car parks, the apron and the remote stands, with devices on the airport's own SIMs and a guaranteed share of capacity for operational traffic.
For an assistance service that means four concrete things:
- One network from help point to aircraft door. The handheld stays on the same network through the whole journey, with no hand-off to a public operator at the building line, so the pickup, transfer and boarding timestamps are captured where they happen.
- Vehicle and equipment location. Ambulifts, buggies and powered wheelchairs can report position continuously, so the dispatcher sees which ambulift is nearest to stand 42 and which wheelchairs are sitting unused at a gate.
- Priority at peak. Staff devices and dispatch traffic can be assigned to a network slice or quality-of-service class that a full arrivals hall cannot crowd out.
- Help points that work in the car park. Call points and video help points in multi-storeys can run over cellular rather than a separate cabled network, which is cheaper to extend into a new car park or a remote drop-off zone.
The same network carries other apron traffic, which is usually what makes the business case. Turnaround and A-CDM milestones, baggage tracking under IATA Resolution 753, CCTV and electric ground support equipment all depend on the same coverage across the same stands. Assistance on its own is rarely a large enough budget line to justify a private network; as one of several airside users, it is the one with a regulator publishing the results every August.
What won't a network fix?
The network fixes data capture and dispatch. It does not fix staffing, and it does not fix pre-notification.
No amount of coverage puts an agent at an aircraft door who is not on shift, and recruiting and keeping assistance agents is a labour-market problem the network cannot touch. Pre-notification is the other gap. The regulation asks for 48 hours' notice, but many requests still arrive unbooked or with the wrong level of need recorded, because the information passed from the passenger to the airline to the airport loses detail at each step. Better dispatch data makes those problems visible sooner and helps a duty manager redeploy agents in real time, but it is a management tool, and the operational decisions still sit with people.
There is also a contract question. Where the airport has outsourced assistance, the provider's devices, the dispatch software and the network sit with different parties, and a private network only helps if the provider's handhelds are put on it. That belongs in the next assistance contract, agreed before the radio planning starts.
Where should an airport start?
Start with a coverage walk of the assistance journey itself, at peak, carrying the devices the agents use.
Take the busiest car park help point, the furthest remote stand, the ambulift route between them and the arrivals reclaim hall, and log where the handheld loses connection, how long the dispatch app takes to recover and how many jobs that day were closed after the fact. Compare those gaps with the stands and times where the airport's own waiting-time data looks weakest in the CAA return. If the two line up, the case for a private network is already written down in the airport's own performance data, and the next step is a radio plan for those specific stands and car parks.