Emirates said: “London Heathrow last evening gave us 36 hours to comply with capacity cuts, of a figure that appears to be plucked from thin air.
“Their communications not only dicated the specific flights on which we should throw our paying passengers, but also threatened legal action for non-compliance.
“This is entirely unreasonable and unacceptable, and we reject these demands.
“Until further notice, Emirates plans to operate as scheduled to and from LHR.”
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Heathrow announced the passenger cap earlier this week and said it would be in place until mid-September.
It asked airlines to stop selling tickets for summer to help the airport as well as cutting some scheduled flights.
Emirates added: “The bottom line is, the London Heathrow management team are cavalier about travellers and their airline customers.
“All the signals of a strong travel rebound were there, and for months, Emirates has been publicly vocal about the matter.
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A Heathrow spokeperson told Express.co.uk: “Aviation is a complex network and no one can operate in isolation. The network continues to suffer from COVID-related challenges.
“While many factors have resulted in the delayed flights, misconnected bags, long waits for arriving bags and last-minute cancellations at Heathrow and airports across Europe in recent weeks – a key issue is airline ground handling teams which are currently only resourced up to 70 percent capacity to serve passenger demand which has returned to 80-85 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
“For months we have asked airlines to help come up with a plan to solve their resourcing challenges, but no clear plans were forthcoming and with each passing day the problem got worse.
“We had no choice but to take the difficult decision to impose a capacity cap designed to give passengers a better, more reliable journey and to keep everyone working at the airport safe.
“We have tried to be as supportive as possible to airlines and our 100k cap on daily departing passengers is significantly higher than the 64k cap at Schiphol.
“It would be disappointing if instead of working together, any airline would want to put profit ahead a safe and reliable passenger journey.”
When it announced the passenger cap, Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye, said: “On average only about 1,500 of these 4,000 daily seats have currently been sold to passengers, and so we are asking our airline partners to stop selling summer tickets to limit the impact on passengers.
“By making this intervention now, our objective is to protect flights for the vast majority of passengers at Heathrow this summer and to give confidence that everyone who does travel through the airport will have a safe and reliable journey and arrive at their destination with their bags.”
Heathrow has had issues with its baggage systems this year with some passengers forced to travel without their luggage.
British Airways, which is based at London Heathrow, has already cut thousands of flights for summer.
Prices have soared as the number of flights has dropped with some tickets to the south of France costing as much as £600.
The passenger cap is just the latest move in the aviation industry ahead of a summer that is likely to be very chaotic for British tourists.
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