The BBC article doesn't include a lot of what I've read in the last couple of days.
First of all there is something of an intention to prioritise people going on their holidays over business travel. The idea being that during the summer, many daily business routes have less traffic so they can cut those flights rather than holiday ones whilst protecting flights which go maybe twice a week to a destination.
Second of all, is Ryanair have said they have hedged their fuel better than anyone else and they now think they are not anticipating any disruption to their service until the end of June at the very earliest (so Whit Holiday is now fine). This is a significant improvement on what they had been saying.
However Ryanair cautioned that they thought that it may well put some other airlines out of business if the blockade lasted much longer and that was one of the real risks as they were really that badly at risk.
My understanding is that Spain have some of the best protected supplies of fuel in Europe (with the UK being one of the most exposed at the other end of the scale). This is reassuring for many. Italy started rationing supplies at four airports in April in order to protect routes and keep planes flying. I don't know how that is going but there was definitely government management of the situation early on with a view to avoid problems later on in a strategic move.
I don't think the BBC article talks about any of this. Yesterday there was agreement made to allow some cutting of routes by allowing airlines to keep landing slots even if they didn't run the number usually required to keep that slot for the next season. This gives airlines more flexibility.
I think I was reading that potentially they think up to 10% of all flights might face disruption. But if this is to be focused on cutting one flight from a schedule of four in a day or cutting one midweek route in a daily schedule and rescheduling passengers onto other available flights the impact is likely to be significantly less than it might well be.
Passenger behaviour is changing too, with Jet2 reporting people booking flights later than usual as they see how the situation is developing. In some ways this is better for airlines as they have dynamic pricing and they will have been able to put the prices higher to cover the increase in cost rather than merely honouring their contract. By this token it's probably longer haul passenger who are likely to be more exposed as those flights tend to be booked further in advance.
If people feel more confident their flight will operate they are more likely to book something and fill flights. This certainly chimes with what I'm hearing from friends - people are being more hesitant and booking. We certainly were planning to go somewhere at half term but haven't booked anything because we didn't want to get stranded. If this is looking less likely, we might.
The problems seem to now be looking more like mid August / September rather than sooner than the initial dramatic noise saying at one point 'Europe only has six weeks of fuel left' which was being said at Easter.