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UK weather: Dozens of flights cancelled at Heathrow as Storm Katie hits on Easter Monday with 100mph winds | |
(35 minutes later) | |
Storm Katie is tearing up the flight schedules at many airports in southern England, with many planes and passengers in the wrong places. Many early morning arrivals at Heathrow have been diverted, with British Airways flights from Johannesburg landing at Shannon in Ireland and Glasgow. BA arrivals from Singapore, Delhi and Dubai are on the ground at Manchester. The Sao Paulo and Bombay services have arrived at Birmingham, while some New York passengers are in Newcastle. | |
BA has cancelled 36 flights to and from Heathrow so far today. | |
Many other airlines have been affected, with American Airlines, South African Airways and United long-haul arrivals diverted. | |
Arrivals at the world’s busiest single-runway airport, Gatwick, have been also been heavily disrupted. The biggest airline at the Sussex airport, easyJet, has so far cancelled 10 flights to and from destinations including Athens, Munich and Nice. The airline says: “Many of our aircraft had to divert to other airports across the UK, as a result of this a number of our aircraft are not in London Gatwick for this morning. Our operations team have made multiple changes to our flying programme in order to limit the disruption to our flights this morning, however we advise all passengers to refer back to flight tracker for the latest information.” | |
BA services to Gatwick from Alicante and Malaga have been diverted to Manchester, with the Venice flight landing at Birmingham. Yet BA’s Toronto-Heathrow service was diverted to Gatwick. | |
The flights expose the shortage of capacity at the UK’s two main airports. With so little slack in the system, recovering from severe weather is a slow process. Many delays and cancellations are expected as Easter Monday goes on, with aircraft and crew out of position. | |
On the railways, the effects of the planned Easter engineering work have been exacerbated by fallen trees on a number of lines in Surrey and Sussex. | |