Airport Christmas for Europe's stranded travellers

Hundreds of stranded travellers spent Christmas morning in European airport terminals after sleeping on camp beds overnight as icy weather grounded flights out of Paris and Brussels.

Flight schedules were returning to normal in Paris, thanks to fresh deliveries of de-icing fluid from Germany and the United States to get planes off the ground, but many people were still set to miss Christmas dinners at their destinations.

Airports were mostly back to normal in Britain, Belgium and Germany, although there were cancellations in Frankfurt and Zurich. Several hundred people slept in Paris and Brussels airports on Friday night.

Freezing weather and heavy snow have disrupted travel for several days, upsetting year-end travel for hundreds of thousands of people and raising questions about the air industry's lack of preparation for icy weather.

Flight delays and cancellations have been compounded by disruption to high-speed trains and clogged road travel from England to Sweden in one of Europe's snowiest Decembers.

At Paris's Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, staff handed out instant coffee and pastries for breakfast on Saturday and transport minister Thierry Mariani told passengers he would look into what caused an acute shortage of de-icing fluid.

At least 300 people slept on military-style beds at Roissy on Friday after some 400 flights were cancelled.

Many slept at nearby hotels, where authorities had reserved 3,300 rooms. While some people cried into mobile phones, others prayed at an airport mass to be able to get on their flights.

A few brought champagne to drink from plastic cups and ate improvised Christmas Eve suppers of smoked salmon, salad, fish pate and cheese cubes, surrounded by suitcases, as a Santa Claus handed out sweets, toys and dolls to children.

"The weather is unpredictable," said Mariani, who arrived at Roissy shortly after midnight on Friday. "You can go to all the effort you like but at the end of the day it's the weather."

The French government has come under fire for a failure to cope with a sudden snowfall this month that left thousands of motorists stuck in cars overnight around Paris, and for a shortage of de-icing fluid at airports that forced 2,000 people to sleep in airport terminals on Thursday night.

Paris airports authority chief Pierre Graff said it had been hard to ramp up local supplies of de-icer because only 5% of production at factories of the chemical goes to airports.

"Of course I feel responsible," he told LCI television.

In Britain, snow delayed tens of thousands of passengers this week. Despite bitter overnight temperatures as low as minus 18 degrees Celsius (-0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in parts of Scotland and England, there was little new snow on Saturday.

A spokesperson for London's Heathrow Airport said only a handful of flights would be cancelled on Christmas Day. The airport will handle some 70,000 passengers on 600 flights.

"There are no snow-related delays today, apart from any cancellations to other airports that aren't open," the spokesperson said. "As an airport we are operating fine."

The Eurostar train service that links London with Paris and northern Europe was not due to operate on Saturday. Trains will run again on Sunday, with only four cancellations out of 45.

Eurostar was hit with crippling delays during the week after speed limits were introduced to cope with the snow and ice.

In Germany, 30cm (12 inches) of snow fell overnight, causing train delays between Hannover and Berlin. Trains to the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen, a tourist destination, were axed.

Light road traffic on Christmas Day meant fewer problems were reported, however, and airports were operating normally.