British Airways (BA) cancelled several flights from London’s Heathrow airport on Saturday, but hoped to operate all domestic flights to and from the airport later in the day. Meanwhile, air-travel chaos also struck travellers in Brazil and India.
BA said it hoped to operate 95% of its Heathrow services, including 87% of short-haul flights, on Saturday, with a full service on Sunday, according to the BBC.
Three days of dense fog have caused hundreds of flight cancellations and severe delays. BA had on Friday cancelled 46 flights on Saturday — far fewer than in the past days.
The disruption followed the cancellation of more than 500 connections in previous days. More than 40 000 travellers were affected.
Smaller British carrier bmi had also cancelled a number of flights as the fog meant air-traffic controllers had to limit the number of hourly take-offs and landings.
BA’s services to Paris and Brussels will begin again on Christmas Eve.
Extra trains and coaches were laid on to transport travellers to destinations in Britain.
Heathrow would normally have handled about 190 000 passengers on Friday but that figure is likely to come down to about 150 000.
BA is using larger aircraft in the form of Boeing 747s and Boeing 777s on some short-haul routes out of Heathrow to Madrid, Frankfurt, Geneva and Copenhagen over the weekend to help increase the number of available seats.
Meanwhile, forecasters at the BBC’s weather centre said they were ”reasonably confident” that visibility would improve at Heathrow on Saturday, as the fog moved north.
Surveys have shown that a record 2,5-million Britons were planning to travel abroad for Christmas this year.
Brazil
In Brazil, the government on Friday ordered air force planes to ferry civilians and the country’s largest airline to halt additional ticket sales in an effort to ease nationwide air travel chaos just days before Christmas.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took the unusual step of calling out military aircraft after TAM Linhas Aereas abruptly grounded six planes for maintenance, causing widespread delays and stranding thousands of holiday travelers throughout Brazil.
The air force said it would make available eight transport planes to reduce the congestion. TAM said it would use two, leaving the rest for other domestic carriers.
The airlines will have to reimburse the government, the air force said.
The nation’s air-travel system, which has been strained for months, was plunged into turmoil after TAM pulled the six planes for emergency repairs on Wednesday, leaving it unable to honour all the tickets sold.
TAM tried to get passengers on to planes flown by other carriers, but there were too few seats to go around. Tropical storms added to delays and cancellations . More than 100 passengers were stuck at airports for 24 hours.
The government’s civil aviation agency has barred TAM from selling any more tickets for Friday flights until all stranded passengers had boarded planes. The airline said it would comply and later scrapped ticket sales for Saturday and Sunday flights.
Nearly half of all flights on Friday were delayed, drawing complaints from Lula. ”If the government is at fault … if the company is at fault, say it. The people have the right to swear at the right person,” the president told reporters.
India
Meanwhile, a thick blanket of fog enveloped the Indian capital, New Delhi, on Saturday morning, disrupting several domestic and international flights.
The runway visibility was less than 75m early in the morning, delaying more than 30 flights, according to airport authorities.
Officials said a couple of flights had taken off at about 9am as the fog cleared but there were more than 50 flights, both international and domestic, waiting to take off.
New Delhi is affected by fog every winter, but an increased number of flights, with several new budget airlines starting operations over the past couple of years, has made matters worse.
Most of the airlines have the technical ability to fly in a visibility range of 550m to 750m, but not below 150m. — Sapa-dpa, Reuters