UNITED KINGDOM: Travel chaos caused by thick fog eases at London's Heathrow Airport as weather improves

The misery faced by tens of thousands of travellers heading home for Christmas through London was eased on Saturday (December 23) after three days of chaos when hundreds of flights were cancelled due to thick fog. British Airways (BA), which has suffered the bulk of the cancellations, said it aimed to fly 95 percent of customers in and out of London's Heathrow Airport as planned on Saturday. However all domestic services from Heathrow, one of the world's busiest airports, have been cancelled up until midday on Saturday and flights to and from Paris and Brussels will not resume until Sunday. The heavy fog which has caused the problems is expected to start lifting later on Saturday, and BA said it hoped to run all its long haul services and 87 percent of its domestic flights. "Massive improvement today. As you can see behind me, probably, the weather's lifted enormously. That dense freezing fog that we suffered for three days has gone now and what we're seeing is the runways moving back to their normal capacity," Managing Director of BAA Heathrow Mark Bullock said. The airline said it planned extra flights with bigger planes to try to ease disruption as the fog begins to clear. "I think they're actually handling things quite well. A bit more signage would be better but they're doing pretty well; they're doing their best," one traveller bound for Melbourne told Reuters Television. "Yeah fine. I'm flying from London to Prague through Amsterdam and everything's going fine so far. I hope it stays that way," a young man bound for Pargue said. On Thursday (December 21), 350 flights were cancelled and a similar number were stopped on Friday (December 22), said a spokesman for airport operator Britisah Airports Authority (BAA), which runs Heathrow and six other British airports. The fog chaos and loss of revenue from hundreds of cancelled flights is expected to cost British Airways millions of pounds. BA published quarterly earnings last month which showed it cost the airline 100 million pounds ($196.5 million) after security was tightened in the wake of what police in August said was a plot to blow up airliners.

ITN Source | December 23, 2006

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