Police foil Just Stop Oil's airport plot to wreck the summer holidays of millions

Bid to ground hundreds of planes and cause misery for families

- Paul Jeeves and Christian Calgie

A EUROPE-wide plot to cause summer holiday chaos for millions of British families by Just Stop Oil activists has been foiled by police.

Airports across the UK were set to be targeted in what detectives believe would have been the ecoactivists' largest co-ordinated strike against the public.

In a series of raids led by the Metropolitan Police, officers arrested 27 JSO activists on suspicion of planning to disrupt flights this summer.

Raids took place in London, Devon, Essex, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Manchester, Surrey, Sussex, Norfolk and West Yorkshire.

Detectives believe airports in top destinations for holidaymakers, including in Spain, Greece and Portugal, may have also been targeted through link-ups with overseas protest groups.

The Just Stop Oil plan aimed to ground hundreds of planes around the time of the school holidays as families attempted to get away. With aircraft unable to take off at locations including Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester, the impact would have left people stranded at other terminals around Europe not originally targeted.

Some 13 million people pass through UK airports during the school holidays, making it a crucial time for the leisure economy.

One airline executive told the Daily Express last night: "Any potential grounding of planes would have caused absolute chaos to flight schedules. And, even if they had succeeded at just one location, it would impact the entire network."