The storm that affected the Balearic Islands on Sunday, with significant damage caused by hurricane-force winds of more than 120 kilometers per hour, also caused real chaos at the airports of the archipelago, where there was another storm: a combination of cancel· locations due to bad weather, a day of peak operations in full operation back in August and a technical error at UK airports which forced the cancellation of more than 500 flights, some bound for the islands. The result: more than 50,000 people were stranded at the airports of the Balearic Islands without being able to return to their places of origin.
Many were stuck for hours in the corridors and some were still there late yesterday afternoon, almost two days after the start of the storm, with no options to return from their holiday in the islands. To make matters worse, some low-cost carriers ran out of aircraft to replace the flow of passengers whose flights had been canceled by the storm, leaving customers stranded with no chance of to fly.
The only option these airlines came up with was to take flights a few days later, which in turn caused the chaos at the airports to be transferred to the sea stations, especially those in Mallorca and Menorca. Hundreds of tourists piled up and lined up to get a ticket and try to leave by boat from some islands turned into robber bars.
Elsa Blanco, a young Catalan woman who was on holiday in Mallorca with two friends, had to spend Sunday night at Son Sant Joan airport due to the impossibility of finding a taxi to return to the address where she had stayed . The service had collapsed and, moreover, it was impossible to find a place to spend the night with the 150 euros offered by the company. The solution was to stay there and sleep on the floor.
“The chairs were full of people and there were hundreds of people sleeping in the corridors, many of them children or babies,” he says. Blanco adds that the airport staff explained to them that they had not seen a similar situation since the collapse that caused the eruption of the volcano in Iceland. “There were a lot of tourists trapped”, he points out. Like her, hundreds of travelers, many with children and babies, spent Sunday night in Son Sant Joan. The scene was repeated at the airports of Menorca and Ibiza, although in a more mitigated way.
Aena assured yesterday that it was working to restore normality, but more than 300 flights were once again affected, just in Palma. On Monday, he had to manage 880 operations in Son Sant Joan, to which were added some of those that had been canceled the day before, with a schedule of nearly 1,000 movements. Aena’s forecast is that, from this afternoon, the flight plan can be fulfilled and the delays and cancellations will end. The intense storms gave a respite yesterday, despite the fact that Aemet’s forecasts were not good.
The technical error that took place in air traffic control systems in the United Kingdom reverberated throughout Europe, with hundreds of flights delayed. The problem was detected in the early hours of Monday, during one of the busiest air traffic days of the whole year, and fully affected London’s Heathrow and Stansted airports, and, although to a lesser extent, Gatwick. “Many flights will still be affected,” warned Transport Secretary Mark Harper yesterday, who asked passengers for understanding and patience and acknowledged that the problem will still cause air traffic disruption throughout this critical week.
