Terminal operations director Al Titterington stated people were due to be able to take through that amount from 1 June last year, but regulations changed and the airport had made its preparations around customers carrying up to two litres.
He added: “This is designed so that you need less lanes, you need less staff.
“Plus, we were a construction site.. and we weren’t as ship-shape as we would have hoped to [have been].”
In the past, more than one in five bags were rejected for oversized liquids, he said.
Queues were reported as the late May bank holiday weekend began last year, with some people taking 90 minutes to get through security.
But Mr Titterington said the airport was “in a much better state” by July 2024 and it had worked “to ensure when the season’s started again in April, we were ready to go and our customer experience statistics are showing us that”.
Asked about last year, he stated: “We’ve done a lot of work over the last 12 months to ensure that we’re not in that position ever again.”