Welcome to an entirely new section of LateDeparture! This little weekly review aims at giving you an overview of what happened in the world of airports over the past seven days; every week. Of course, in true LateDeparture fashion, I will specifically focus on airport developments and non-developments (read: delays). If, however, you’re after official on-time performance reports, you’re at the wrong spot. In that case you may want to try this site instead. Everyone else, please read on;-)

First of all, the harsh winter weather continued in many parts around the US and therefore added further delays across a number of US airports. Texas received a hit on Wednesday when more than 400 flights at Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport (IATA: DFW) were cancelled as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

On Thursday Eurocontrol tweeted about a low intensity volcanic ash cloud near Mount Etna in Italy. I of course immediately remembered all the panic about Iceland’s volcano ‘Eyjafjallajökull’ and the massive cancellations that followed. Luckily, this one does not seem to have the same effects on European aviation (if any at all).

Left out from global news most of the time, the two busiest Australian airports received some rare bad press this week: Melbourne (IATA: MEL) got into the news with overly expensive airport parking and Sydney (IATA: SYD) apparently failed on customer satisfaction in general.

But even we at LateDeparture had a busy week with two blog posts: the first one focused on the ATW Airline Achievement Awards which were handed out to the winners in Washington on Monday. Overall winner was Emirates who won the prestigious ‘Airline of the Year Award’. On Thursday we then posted our newest review about Cairns International airport with the title “No Hinterland Airport: Cairns Domestic“.

That’s it for this week – enjoy the catch-up reading and see you in a week again!

[Picture from Flickr – Some rights reserved by CameliaTWU]