Not to mention the refusal of the Army’s offer of help to move the snow. Because they’d been handling it all so well at that point.
Is all of this really caused by a mere 5 inches of snow? I have heard that figure on two different news broadcasts but it must be mistaken. Please tell me it took more than 5 inches of snow to cause all this chaos.
5 inches of snow in London, where it’s unusual for it to snow at all, let alone settle, is quite a lot. It’s nearly as far north as Buffalo but far more temperate thanks to maritime influence, so snow preparedness is practically on the same level of importance as hurricane preparedness.
I lived in Oxford for seven years and we didn’t get five inches of snow for the entire time I lived there. Not five inches of snow in a single snowstorm, five inches of snow total, in seven years. So, yeah, I think five inches of snow in a single storm is unusual enough for southern England that Heathrow might be unprepared.
Five inches, that’s it. But it was heavy, they whined. There was tons and tons of it. Crap, the supermarkets in NJ cleared more than that.
Daughter is home, and brought some papers. It seems that Heathrow got bought by a Spanish company, and they decided to save money to pay off their loan by skimping on snow removal preparations. Gatwick spent about 9 million pounds over last year, Heathrow spent 500,000 pounds, and in total had a smaller snow removal budget than Gatwick, though it is much bigger. There are calls for heads to roll, like the head of BAA.
Someone in the paper said that when it snows five inches in Denmark, people think about checking their snow tires.
Buffalo is 42 degrees North, London is 51 degrees North.
How disruptive snow can be depends on how used to it the area is. Many places get snow very rarely. 5 inches of snow in San Francisco would cause chaos as well.
Oh man, that sucks. I hadn’t even considered that aspect of this gigantic mess.
Other airports and/or airlines across Europe went well out of their way to accommodate stranded travelers. Schiphol put out 1,700 cots for people to sleep on. In Copenhagen, someone opened some meeting rooms and provided hundreds of chairs for people to at least be able to sit in in the queues, instead of on the floor (my husband witnessed this first-hand, so no link).
Sometimes weather conditions really do make it dangerous to load and/or unload luggage from airplanes.
I just had the displeasure of flying Air France for the first time. They’re French, but I didn’t expect such piss-poor attitude from flight attendants. I’ve never flown Etihad, Singapore or Qatar, but Scandinavian Airlines kicks all kinds of butt. Not only is their customer service unbelievably awesome, but they have the Best Airplane Food Ever!
That’s where I am right now! And I’m damn lucky I got here. I was scheduled to fly LAX to New York JFK to Amsterdam to Copenhagen on Friday the 17th. On Thursday morning (5AM!) I got a call from KLM that they had oversold one of my flights, and were looking for volunteers to change their itinerary to take 2 Air France flights; LAX to Paris CDG, then on to CPH. Well, that cut out one stop entirely, and they offered a $400 voucher, so why the heck not?!
I don’t know how I got to be one of the lucky ones they called to volunteer, but if they hadn’t contacted me I’d’ve been one of those overnighting for several days in Amsterdam. As it is, I was lucky to have gotten either in or out of Paris – the next day they were canceling most of their flights, as well!
Another major storm is supposed to be moving in tonight, so travel may get bad again. I hope we make it home on the 1st!
Glad to hear your daughter made it home for Christmas!
Even at that, it’s pretty uncommon for Dallas as well, and we got something like 9 inches of snow in a single day in February of this year. It did shut down the airport, but it didn’t cause nearly the absolute and total clusterfuck that the relatively paltry 5 inches of snow caused at Heathrow.
From what I can tell (having watched hours of CNN-World and BBC World News lately), BAA made some kind of mistake in terms of clearing snow from the plane stands at the terminals, and although the runways were cleared relatively early, they had to hand-clear the snow from around the planes just to get them out and to get the new planes in.
I dodged a bullet of sorts- my wife and I were in Rome and scheduled to fly to Heathrow and then to Dallas on the 21st, but those got cancelled. Luckily, we were able to book a Milan-JFK flight tomorrow, although getting to Milan and staying the extra 3 nights is on our nickel… Screw American Airlines. They weren’t even nice about rescheduling us or trying to help us at all. Nor do they seem to have a European number to call that’s obvious from their website.
That Spanish company used to be part of our Ministry of Transportation, before getting “privatized”. They now combine the worst of the public and corporate work ethics. We have quite a few monsters like that around…
bump, you should be able to get compensation: it doesn’t matter where the aircarrier is incorporated, the problem happened in Europe and falls under EU compensation rules.
I’d agree BA is okay- in my most recent experience Qantas was far better. Ten years ago I think I would have had that opinion reversed.
We saw some article noting the the EU minister told the airlines in no uncertain terms that they will pay passengers for accommodations and food.
In the US they recently put in rules saying that passengers stuck on airlines too long would get compensated, and the airlines would pay a hefty fine per passenger. This meant that a lot of flights got canceled sooner, but since in my experience you sit for hours and get canceled anyway, I think this was a plus. I haven’t read about anyone getting stuck on the runway as has usually been the case.
Check out this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/30/business/30tarmac.html?src=busln
Apparently, they are still trapping people on the tarmac with impunity as long as it’s an international flight.
One flight this past weekend was stuck on the tarmac for 11 hours, and four flights I believe were stuck on the tarmac overnight.
Well, Denmark is probably the least equipped to deal with snow of all the Nordic countries, for the simple reason that they get the least of it. Still, Kastrup doesn’t shut down for a week when the snow comes. Five inches may have the city of Copenhagen scrambling to get enough plows on the streets, but the airport will reopen ASAP - it’s a business with a reputation to protect, after all.
Some British aviation expert dude was on the news claiming that it wasn’t fair to compare how British airports react to snow with how Scandinavian airports react, because - and this is what he said - Britain gets a different kind of snow. :rolleyes: He needs to talk to a Scandinavian cross-country skiing fanatic, who would be happy not only to tell him about the various types of snow that can fall and the conditions that create each kind, but also the appropriate way to prepare skis for each sort of snow, taking into consideration how old the snow is and what weather conditions have been like since it fell. He would probably end up chewing his own arm off from sheer boredom, which seems to me to be appropriate: stupidity that deep should hurt.
Did you see the interview with the tarmac worker at Gardermoen yesterday? That was comedy gold. Some BBC journo nob was asking him how much time it’d take them to clear the Heathrow, if they were down there.
Journo: “So - how quickly could you and the rest of your crew clear Heathrow, you think?”
Worker: “'Bout 20, I think.”
Journo: “20?! My God, where were you last week? If you could have cleared it up in 20 hours, they’d make you a hero!”
Worker: “Minutes.”
NOOOOOOO! I missed it! Damn. If anybody finds a link to this on YouTube or anywhere, would you please please post it?
In the meantime I will imagine the snow-clearing guy had a Petter Solberg accent 
The article didn’t make this entirely clear, but this was because of customs problems. The border agents, Federal employees not under the control of the airport (control of their hours is vested in the United States Attorney General), went home without clearing all the international planes. I am by no means an expert but it appears to me that Federal law requires the detention of “all persons” entering the US in either a secure facility or onboard the vessel unless they are authorized by a customs agent. 8 CFR 235.3.
My understanding is that the passengers were unable to deplane without access to border inspection, and there wasn’t a secure area (or maybe not one large enough for all the passengers, I’m pretty sure they do have detention facilities along the lines of interrogation rooms at JFK).
Now, JFK should be set up so it is possible to deplane into a secure holding area in the event of the unavailability of border agents, (and the AG should have ordered overtime) but I’m not sure what else the airline could have done in these circumstances. No passenger bill of rights is going to overcome the airport’s requirement to comply with federal immigration law.
I don’t know the current state of the investigation, but it sounds like Cathay Pacific thought there would be gates available (they borrow British Airways’ gates), and there weren’t. It also sounds like the flights never should have taken off to begin with knowing the weather was coming in. That is squarely the airline’s fault. So I don’t think we can lay it all at the feet of customs problems (though they certainly exacerbated the problem).
Didn’t know that. I must have missed it when reading the articles. Interesting.