National
Barajas airport slowly recovers after weekend weather chaos
By h.b. - Jan 11, 2009 - 8:25 PM
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All four runways were back in use at Barajas Airport in Madrid on Sunday, but despite that conditions were for from normal as the airport struggled to recover from the five hour closure caused by an unexpected snowstorm on Friday afternoon.
Thousands of people continued trapped at the airport on Sunday afternoon and the situation has not been helped by the ongoing dispute between Iberia management and pilots. 701 flights were cancelled over Friday and Saturday in total and just some 31 Iberia flights were cancelled on Sunday.
The Spanish Airport Authority, AENA, has announced it is to take action against Iberia for the chaos at Barajas, and the much criticised Minister for Development, Magdalena Álvarez said that normality would return to Barajas on Sunday night. She said they would investigate to see if Iberia had met its obligations to its passengers, given that some passengers had suffered ‘inadmissible incidents’. But she defended the decision to close the airport on Friday, saying that it was taken for safety reasons.
On Saturday there were reports of riots on planes as some 45,000 passengers were affected by long delays.
Álvarez had earlier admitted that her ministry was caught out by the snowfall, but noted that so were regional and local administrations. She said that the Spanish Meteorological Agency had failed to warn about the severity of the storm, and noted that some 25 international airports had suffered similar conditions because of the weather over the past three months.