Thousands hit by air travel chaos
By Suzie Decker,WNS London Correspondent
LONDON - Thick fog is causing havoc for Christmas travelers in Britain for a third day, with hundreds of flights cancelled at airports. Some 350 flights were affected at Heathrow -- Europe's busiest airport -- including all British Airways' domestic flights. But BA announced Friday afternoon that it planned to start operating domestic services in and out of the airport from midday on Saturday following a gap of three days. Flights from Heathrow to Paris and Brussels would resume on Sunday, the airline said.
Geoff Want, BA's director of ground operations, said: "We are hopeful that the weather will improve slightly over the weekend and therefore we can get back to operating a full planned Christmas Eve schedule."We are drafting in extra staff from across the airline over the weekend to ensure that customers get to their final destinations before Christmas Day." Britain's Meteorological Office said the fog around the airport would finally begin to lift on Saturday morning. Spokesman Keith Fenwick said: "While it may remain gray and misty, the key factor -- visibility -- should improve considerably."
BA was operating all long-haul services in and out of Heathrow on Friday, but some departing passengers were expected to face delays of several hours. It said it hoped to operate 95 percent of services from the airport on Saturday, including 87 percent of short-haul flights, followed by a full schedule on Sunday. An airline spokesman said it was offering customers "the three Rs -- rebooking, rerouting and refunds." Heathrow's second-busiest airline, bmi, had scrapped eight flights by early Friday morning on top of 40 cancellations Thursday. The chaos was expected to continue at other British airports, with Gatwick, Norwich, Southampton and Coventry among those predicting further delays.
A spokesman for airport operator BAA, which runs Heathrow and six other British airports, said although it is the world's busiest international airport, it has only two runways. "We have fundamental capacity constraints," he added. He said BAA was providing a range of amenities for stranded passengers, including heated marquees outside terminals at Heathrow, with blankets and ponchos, sleeping mats, children's packs and food and drink. BA also had buses to take as many as 3,000 people north from Heathrow to cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where flights were going ahead as normal. Heathrow would normally have handled around 190,000 passengers on Friday, but that figure is likely to come down to around 150,000.
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