After Sandy’s dominance in our news reporting last week, this week airport news saw a wider, geographical spread with articles reaching us from Australia, South Africa, Germany or the United Kingdom.

Let’s start with the most recent one: Australia. Today The Age reported that a domino effect that felled contractors to four of the nation’s largest airlines led to chaotic scenes in airports across Australia today, with thousands of passengers delayed for hours. According to the article Virgin, Jetstar, Tiger and Regional Airlines lost their ability to check-in or board thousands of passengers on to their flights for three hours.

Whilst Sandy was the dominating news last week, New York didn’t get completely missed out of the airport news headlines this week as more than 2,240 flights were scrubbed on Wednesday and Thursday because of heavy snow and gusting winds, according to industry researcher FlightAware.com reported by Business Week. Sandy, by the way, caused the cancellation of around 20,000 (!) flights.

Over in Europe we received news that Air Berlin Plc sued Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg GmbH, the operator of the German capital’s airport, for what could amount to tens of millions of euros over a 16- month delay to the opening of the airline’s new hub, reported Business Week.

London’s third largest airport, Stansted Airport (STN) just became a little less popular after it introduced terminal drop-off charges yesterday. The BBC wrote that [the airport] is to introduce a £2 charge for dropping off or collecting passengers at the terminal doors and quoted the airport saying that it wants to encourage more people to use public transport to reduce traffic emissions and discourage parking in nearby streets. This sounds more like another money making scheme to us.

And now to our final story. It’s a funny one. Are you excited? Well, first of all it’s coming from South Africa. That’s not the funny bit (obviously). According to an AFP report, an airport in South Africa renamed twice in two weeks. First it was renamed to “Bram Fischer Airport” – a name after the celebrated anti-apartheid figure and former Nelson Mandela lawyer. Then about a week later it was officially renamed “Bram Fischer International Airport.” We guess someone screwed up and forgot about the “International” bit. Ooops.

That’s all from us – safe travels!

[Photo of Melbourne’s Terminal 1 by Wikipedia – some rights reserved]