Posted on 12/22/2006 10:58:50 AM PST by blam
The great Christmas standstill
By David Millward, Transport Correspondent and Richard Holt
Last Updated: 5:57pm GMT 22/12/2006
The misery has worsened for passengers at Britain’s airports today as freezing fog forced hundreds of domestic and European flights to be cancelled.
A blanket of fog engulfs a runway at Heathrow
People stranded at Heathrow woke from a few hours sleep slumped over café tables to hear the news that further flights had been cancelled.
Whilst conditions are still predicted to be bad overnight, forecasts for the weekend have improved.
British Airways plans to start operating domestic services in and out of Heathrow from midday tomorrow after a gap of three days. Its Heathrow to Paris and Heathrow to Brussels services, which have been axed during the last few days, will resume on Sunday.
BA says it hopes to operate 95 per cent of its services tomorrow, including 87 per cent of short-haul flights. The airline plans a full Heathrow service on Christmas Eve.
Today Coventry airport was forced to remain shut as temperatures remained well below the 3C (37F) needed to lift fog.
Services from Gatwick, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London City, Norwich, Southampton and Cardiff have also been disrupted.
The fog is the worst Christmas weather to hit Britain since 1997, when storms ravaged north Wales, Lancashire and the Lake District.
Michael Dukes, a forecaster for MeteoGroup UK, said the the heavy blanket of fog would begin to lift on Saturday.
"In the next 24 hours, fog will still be a major problem across some parts of England, with fog and frost setting in again after dark tonight," he said.
"But there is a glimmer of hope for Christmas. Latest forecast models are indicating there may be an end to the fog problems across the Midlands and south-east England late tomorrow and on Christmas Eve."
While Heathrow took the brunt of the cancellations, passengers across the country faced delays and cancellations.
Coventry and Norwich were completely shut and in Scotland, 20 flights were cancelled from Edinburgh, 17 from Glasgow and 10 from Aberdeen. The disruption left thousands of Scots unable to fly to see friends and family.
About 70,000 BA passengers have been hit by the delays and cancellations and the airline has been fending off claims that it cut domestic and short-haul services to protect the more lucrative long-haul flights, especially to North America.
Howard Wheeldon, an aviation analyst with the online brokerage firm BGC, said: “BA has a lot of explaining to do. Short-haul services are by far the weakest part of the airline’s portfolio and there is bound to be temptation to scrap them when there is pressure to release slots from air traffic control.”
This was denied by BA. A spokesman said: “We have had to take a lot of flights out of the schedule and the services we have chosen are ones where there are alternative ways of completing the journey.”
BA axed 33.4 per cent of its services, which included all of its domestic routes as well as flights to a number of other European destinations. The other main short-haul carrier, bmi, scrapped 55 of its 172 services, but did maintain some flights within Britain.
British Airways passengers whose flights have been cancelled are entitled to a full refund, the airline has said, even though the company is not obliged to offer compensation as the problem is weather-related.
Other airlines were also forced to reduce services after air traffic controllers cut the number of flights they would allow to land at Heathrow from 45 to about 22 an hour. This was to double the gap between planes from three miles to six.
Heathrow was worst hit because its traffic is constant, providing little scope for managers to juggle space on the tarmac. As a result thousands of disgruntled travellers were left milling around Heathrow, where terminals were crowded and marquees erected to help deal with the overspill.
Seats on alternative services out of Stansted and Luton - which had minimal disruption - were at a premium, with most flights full. No-frills carriers were able to carry some refugees from Heathrow, but at a price.
“It is worth people checking,” said an easyJet spokesman. “Tickets won’t be cheap, because they become more expensive as the plane fills up.”
There was a scramble for places on long-distance trains. Virgin, which operates on the West Coast main line, has laid on seven extra trains today.
“We will get everybody up to Scotland, but they may have to wait a bit longer,” a spokesman said. “There will be some standing.”
The company also scrapped off-peak boarding restrictions, which meant that those travelling on the more congested services did not have to pay a premium price. GNER, which operates on the East Coast main line, at first refused to do so but followed Virgin’s example today.
Friday December 22, 2006
By CHASE SQUIRES
Associated Press Writer
DENVER (AP) - Thousands of frustrated holiday travelers queued up at the ticket counters Friday morning, desperate for a flight out as Denver International Airport prepared to reopen its runways after a two-day blizzard shutdown.
Airline officials weren't offering much cheer: It could take days to clear out the backlog, and some passengers might not make it home for Christmas.
``We're asking for their patience as we work to get people where they need to be as soon as we safely can,'' said United Airlines spokesman Jeff Kovick.
More than 2,000 flights were canceled Wednesday through Friday at Denver, the nation's fifth-busiest airport, causing a ripple effect that disrupted air travel around the country just as the holiday crush began. Rain east of the Mississippi river added to the mess, causing delays in Chicago, Cleveland and Washington, among other cities.
Many of the travelers stranded in Denver found themselves on standby Friday morning, hoping to get on another flight at a time when open airline seats are scarce.
``It's like the movie '(The) Terminal,' except it's real,'' said Joanna Snyder, a teacher from Jackson, Wyo., referring to the 2004 moving starring Tom Hanks as a European stranded at a U.S. airport.
Every now and then, tempers flared in the crowded terminal lines as travelers waited for the expected noon reopening of the runways.
When a few people tried to cut in line at a Frontier Airlines counter around 3 a.m., former Marine Javier Diaz confronted them. He said police nearby had declined to intervene.
``I grabbed the stanchion and basically just put it in front of them and said they weren't going to get in line,'' Diaz said. ``It got pretty heated.''
Airline workers eventually smoothed out the problem, he said.
Frontier had 65,000 bumped passengers to move systemwide, and the airline was already 90 percent booked for the holidays, Frontier spokesman Joe Hodas.
Atlanta businessman Scott Carr was one of them. While an army of snow plows worked on the runways so the airport could at least resume limited operations, he booked four flights on three different airlines to increase his chances of making it home for Christmas. He said he was considering driving to Kansas City to catch a flight.
``I just want to get home to see my family,'' Carr said as he stood in a Frontier Airlines line that wrapped around to the opposite side of the terminal. ``If I have to drive, at least I'll be getting closer.''
An estimated 4,700 travelers spent Wednesday night at the airport. By Thursday evening, about two-thirds of them had found hotel rooms, but others still slept on cots in the airport, in chairs or wrapped up in coats and cardboard shelters on the concourse floors.
Workers in orange vests directed the human traffic and offered blankets and what other supplies they could to the stranded travelers.
The storm, Colorado's worst since a March 2003 blizzard, brought life to a standstill for 3.8 million people along the Front Range - a 170-mile urban corridor along the eastern edge of the Rockies that includes Denver.
Some mountain areas got more than 3 feet of snow, and up to 25 inches fell in the Denver metropolitan area. Bus and train service was shut down. Police and National Guard soldiers rescued hundreds of people stuck in cars.
In Wyoming, a woman died while walking for help after her car became stuck in the snow, officials said. In Kansas, a woman was hit by a tractor-trailer on an icy road.
Denver's normally bustling downtown began showing signs of life as the sun came out, but mail delivery was still suspended and many malls were closed on what should have been a busy shopping day.
The Denver airport hoped to get 100 stranded aircraft off the ground within the first hour of reopening, then begin allowing carriers to arrive at a rate of about 10 per hour, said Southwest Airlines chief dispatcher Mike Tyson. His airline normally flies 32 daily flights from Denver and had to cancel 13 on Friday.
``They're going to start slowly and see how things go,'' Tyson said.
The airport's goal is to allow carriers to arrive at a rate of 30 aircraft per hour, or one quarter of full capacity, by Friday afternoon, he said.
Aviation analyst Michael Boyd criticized the airport's handling of the snowstorm.
``With six runways, not even one can be open within a few hours? There's something wrong at DIA,'' he said. ``Minneapolis doesn't have that problem, Salt Lake doesn't have that problem.''
Airport spokesman Steve Snyder said plows were running during the storm, but the snow came fast and winds whipped drifts up to 5 feet high under the wings of grounded planes.
Plow managers expected to have two runways cleared by noon Friday. Other areas that needed to be cleared included deicing areas, taxi areas and stretches of tarmac. Ticket crews, Transportation Security Agency workers and other logistics still had to arranged before the airport could open.
``You can't just turn an airport on with a switch,'' Snyder said.
Working in the industry, I can attest that this does happen. But its not always the fault of the airline. The Governments refusal to revisit slot swapping or any kind of ATC relief for hub cities is largely to blame. Ohare is a classic example..
More evidence of global warming.
Well, they are on a hightened state of alert across the pond.
Perhaps the fog has thwarted the plans of some terrorists over there.
hightened = heightened
(I'm conserving "e"s today)
Yup. Hadn't thought of that.
My English-born wife laughs when I talk about foggy weather in Wisconsin...like the kind we had a few days ago. She said, "when you can't see your hand in front of your face, that's foggy" she sneered.
Did you hear the one about the guy trying to fly to London from Denver?
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