Airlines, Airports, Asia, Europe, In the News, Oceania, Weekly

This week: Europe’s flight delays, VietJet lands at wrong airport & more

This one has been a rather busy week with lots of airport delay news flowing into our news desk . Fortunately most of them were rather minor on the “delay gravity” scale. Here are our topics:

It was buried among other news, so we nearly missed this one when a Danish news portal reported on Thursday that a strike by SAS Ground Holding has grounded all of the airline’s flights at Copenhagen Airport (CPH) this evening. In a later update, the same news outlet reported that passengers will now be flown without their baggage as SAS Ground Holding employee strike continues. A few hours later the negotiations apparently were successful as it was reported that the baggage-handlers returned to their duties. Lucky or deliberate timing? The very next day the first wave of Danes were hitting the airport in their Thousands as the summer holiday rush kicked off.

On the other side of the planet, at the start of the Australian winter holiday school break, Sydney airport (SYD) reported a power outage disrupting domestic flights this week. The Wall Street Journal reported that Qantas and Virgin Australia said some local flights had to be canceled, and advised passengers against coming to the crowded Terminal 2 on Friday. The earlier outage, which began in the morning, disrupted check-ins and crashed security-scanning equipment. Power was restored later that day.

Back to Europe where the British Telegraph reported that hundreds of flights to and from France have been cancelled each day since an industrial action began on Tuesday, with the disruption expected to last a full six days. But unions announced on Wednesday that they had called off the strike. According to the article this came as Belgian air traffic controllers began a series of two-hour walkouts over a 24-hour period. The action affected about 400 flights on Wednesday. One prominent victim of the action was US Secretary of State John Kerry, who – according to The Irish Independent – had to take the train from Brussels to Paris.

Ryanair was in the news again this week when the BBC reported that two of its jets were damaged when they collided on the ground at London’s Stansted Airport (STN). According to the article one plane was approaching the stand and the other was “pushing back” when the incident happened on Saturday morning local time. Passengers were put on other planes after a three-hour delay.

Our last news item for this week comes from Vietnam where – again– a plane landed at the wrong airport. Yep. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of VietJet’s domestic Vietnamese flights landed at the wrong airport last week and it is waiting for the results of an official inquiry into the incident. VietJet Air Flight VJ8861 landed at Cam Ranh airport (CXR) near Nha Trang City in central Vietnam on June 19 instead of Liên Khương airport (DLI) near Đà Lạt City in the country’s Central Highlands, as scheduled, the budget carrier said. The two cities are more than 100 kilometers apart. The airline, which operates 15 Airbus A320 single aisle jets, didn’t explain how the plane landed at the wrong airport, saying it is waiting for details from an investigation.

That’s all for this week – safe travels!

[Graphic from Wikipedia]