Dense fog played spoilsport for the third consecutive day on Friday, forcing cancellation of hundreds of fights at Heathrow and leaving thousands of holidaymakers stranded here but Air-India flights, barring a few diversions, are flying on schedule.
HS Rao
LONDON: Dense fog played spoilsport for the third consecutive day on Friday, forcing cancellation of hundreds of fights at Heathrow and leaving thousands of holidaymakers stranded here but Air-India flights, barring a few diversions, are flying on schedule.
Air-India regional manager for UK and Ireland K D Row said, "All Air India flights are on schedule".
He said Toronto-Birmingham and Chicago-London-Mumbai flights were diverted to Paris but they returned here subsequently and operated normally.
British Airways, Europe's third-biggest airline, was forced to cancel about 40 per cent of its short-haul flights.
Fog prompted air traffic controllers to scale back the pace of takeoffs and landings on December 20 at Heathrow, which is witnessing a heavy rush due to the holiday season, causing about 315 cancellations on Thursday alone.
Things are likely to stay grim on the weather front on Saturday, with the UK Meteorological Office forecasting foggy or cloudy conditions with "poor" or "very poor" visibility.
Visibility may improve to "good" on December 24. Heathrow handles about 1,300 flights a day of carriers including Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Air France-KLM Group and Deutsche Lufthansa AG.
British Airways is operating all long-haul flights and is using twin-aisle planes to boost capacity on some short-haul routes from Heathrow, its spokeswoman said on Friday.
The three days of cancellations, including all UK domestic flights, will reduce earnings for the carrier this quarter, said Cathy West, a British Airways spokeswoman who declined to specify when an estimate would be released.
British Airways cut all domestic flights and some elsewhere to Europe from Heathrow on December 20 and Thursday. The carrier said today that it is using a Boeing Co. 747 and a Boeing 777 to add capacity from Heathrow to Madrid, Frankfurt, Geneva and Copenhagen.
Competitor BMI, the second-biggest airline at Heathrow after British Airways, said it is still operating "as many flights as possible", including domestic routes, though some cancellations and delays are "inevitable."
Lufthansa, Europe's second biggest airline, has cancelled 24 of the 76 flights scheduled between Germany and the UK on Friday, Jan Baerwalde, a spokesman said.
Mark Bullock, BAA's managing director for Heathrow, said, "We are working extremely hard with airlines to operate as many flights as possible for passengers so that they can make their journeys for Christmas."
The delays are the result of "the extreme weather, necessary safety limits and the lack of spare capacity at Heathrow."
The Heathrow cancellations probably affected 40,000 passengers on Thursday, of which about half would have stayed where they are and not begun travel, while the rest probably arrived at Heathrow and were stranded, BAA said.
Heathrow served 67.7 million passengers in 2005. Its biggest customer is British Airways.
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