One former cabin crew member calls Monarch airline collapse 'heartbreaking'

One former member of Monarch's cabin crew has told Newsbeat that the collapse of the airline is "heartbreaking" and said he and other staff had been "panicking".

Cameron, 19, had been working with the company for nearly a year when news broke on Monday that the firm had been placed in administration.

It's now been confirmed that all 1,900 staff will be laid off.

"I was shocked more than anything," the ex-Monarch worker says.

"I genuinely believed that we would survive, albeit without the holidays part of the company, and we would continue without that part of the business.

"But to have it all collapse is heartbreaking."

More than 11,000 passengers were expected to arrive back in the UK by Monday night in what the government described as Britain's biggest peacetime repatriation.

Thousands more people will be brought home as their holidays finish at a cost of around £60m.

More than 250,000 other holidaymakers have had flights cancelled.

"The atmosphere was shock," says the former Monarch worker, who moved to Gatwick from Dorset for the job.

"To actually see the people I was with yesterday in tears this morning, it hurt.

"People have dedicated their lives to this company. Some have been here for 30 plus years, and they're rightly worried about what will happen to them now."

In a letter to staff, Monarch chief executive Andrew Swaffield said the "root cause" of the airline's plunging revenues was terror attacks in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as the "decimation" of the tourist trade in Turkey.

This is the letter from Mr Swaffield to staff.

Cameron says companies like Virgin, Norwegian, British Airways and TUI have been in touch already to offer some people jobs.

"Monarch is held in quite high regard in the industry I think, so other airlines are just trying to take us on," he says.

"Granted we'll all be competing against one another, due to there being more than 1,000 crew available.

"They are going to have limited spaces and I suspect that a lot of those airlines' positions are actually for next summer.

"Having had a meeting with the administrators, I'm feeling a little bit numb to it all.

"The prospect of having no job, no income and having to move back home is one that I did not relish."

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