LONDON: London’s Heathrow Airport cancelled a fifth of flights yesterday and airlines scrapped 40 percent of flights to Paris’s main airports as snow continued to blanket parts of Europe, with more forecast.
Heathrow Ltd, which is owned by Spain’s Ferrovial, said the reduced schedule — amounting to around 250 fewer flights — would help it cope with the snowfall without making further cancellations.
As snow continued to fall through yesterday, the airport operator said flight schedule would be cut by 10 percent.
That number could rise, depending on conditions at other European airports, Heathrow said.
The Paris airport operator, ADP, said airlines scrapped 40 percent of flights in and out of the two main airports on the outskirts of Paris, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, primarily reducing short-haul services.
London’s Stansted and Gatwick airports said they were operating as normal but that delays and some flight cancellations were likely. Weather forecaster the Met Office said snow was likely to continue into today.
As much as eight centimetres was expected in southeast England, it said.
More than 400 flights were cancelled on Friday, while on Saturday 111 flights, most of them operated by IAG’s British Airways, were cancelled and hundreds of passengers spent the night in Heathrow’s terminals. (Reuters)
