Ice and snow causes chaos at Geneva airport

Geneva airport spokesman Bertrand Stämpfli told Swisster that flight cancellations over the weekend prompted a “critical” situation on Sunday evening. Some 3,000 passengers were unable to board their flights as sub-zero temperatures coupled with snow and ice in many European hubs forced the cancellation of 30 flights at Cointrin.

Around 200 passengers were forced to sleep at the airport after failing to find a hotel for the night. Airport authorities said they did their best to located accommodation for stranded travellers.

“At 3am we were still taking the last passengers to hotels and had to look as far as Montreux because many were fully booked in Geneva,” said Stämpfli.

He described the situation over the weekend as “chaotic” and said delays and cancellations on Saturday had a knock-on effect for air travel on Sunday. “Everything seemed to be going well but then things on Saturday took a turn for the worse.”

The airports of Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris and London had to close for up to three hours at a time as they cleared snow and ice from their runways. This barred the way for planes in Geneva headed to those destinations and vice versa.

Overall 10 schedules were cancelled on Saturday, affecting a few hundred passengers. Many rebooked on other later flights the same day.

“Then yesterday afternoon there was a domino effect due to accumulated problems,” said Stampfli. Geneva airport also had to close temporarily on two occasions for half-an-hour to clear snow from the runway with snow ploughs.

“We try to reassure passengers but often we have sparse information and it is difficult to know when services will resume,” explained Stämpfli. Often people got impatient especially when required to wait in a queue of 150 people at the information desk, he said.

“It’s horrible, you already are in the holiday frame of mind and suddenly you realise that you’ll be delayed for a time you can’t quantify,” he said.

The outlook for this week is difficult to predict, said Stämpfli, who explained that the worst weather is frozen rain, which grounds planes. He also warned it would be several days for schedules to normalize after the weekend’s disruptance. “Some might be late for their turkey dinner,” he said.

On Monday morning, about 30 flights to the airports of Amsterdam, Munich, Toulouse and Amsterdam were cancelled and passengers are encouraged to consult the airport website for up-to-date information.

The weekend before Christmas is one of the busiest for the hub. Over the weekend 100,000 passengers used the airport, including 30 charter flights carrying 5,000 skiers (mostly British) to Geneva.

Although the airport did not experience the same chaos yesterday, Zurich is also experiencing delays, with 12 flights into the city cancelled on Monday. Fifty flights travelling to and out of the airport were also cancelled over the weekend.

“We are still suffering from the weekend,” spokeswoman Sonja Zöchling told Swisster.

Weather conditions have affected the destinations of Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Manchester, she said. Despite weekend temperatures reaching -17 degress Celsius at night and -8 over the weekend,  Zöchling said this morning thermometers were showing higher readings of one or two degrees.