Another week has well and truly passed and our inbox got filled with interesting airport related news stories. Here’s what we found for you this week:
- WWII bomb disrupts Frankfurt
- Strange odor forces emergency landing
- Free strollers go missing at Gatwick
Earlier in the week this news reached us from Germany, courtesy of ABC News: A World War II bomb found Tuesday next to a highway near Frankfurt airport (FRA) was disposed of in a controlled explosion, causing some disruption to flight operations. According to the article a stretch of the A3 highway near Offenbach, outside Frankfurt, was closed Tuesday after the 500-kilogram British bomb was found. Police shut off a 1,000-meter area around the site. They destroyed the bomb in a controlled explosion after deciding that it wasn’t possible to defuse the device, news agency dpa reported. One airport runway was closed for landings because planes weren’t allowed to fly directly over the site. Plans called for landings to be suspended altogether for a time.
Maybe it’s a good thing that you can’t smell news articles. This one might have smelled a bit funny: FOX reported this week that a strange odor forced an emergency landing at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) late Monday evening. Doctors treated four people after the odor forced the emergency landing around 10 p.m. The American Airlines flight took off for Germany around that time, but the crew smelled the odor and turned the plane around. There has been no word on what caused the smell.
It was supposed to be a way of helping hard-pressed families with tired children cope as they stepped off their long holiday flight, wrote the Daily Mail in the introduction into our last article of this week. But the idea of providing a fleet of 150 complimentary pushchairs at the arrivals hall at Gatwick Airport (LGW) has backfired – after the majority of them were stolen by passengers. According to the article instead of leaving the buggies at the designated drop-off point in the baggage reclaim area when their own pushchair arrives on the carousel, some holidaymakers have brazenly walked off with them before loading them into their car or boarding the Gatwick Express rail service with their newly acquired booty. Apparently an order for a further 200 has now been placed but airport workers expect many of these to disappear too unless a security device or alarm is fitted to prevent their removal.
That’s all for this week. We’ll now take a well deserved break for the next two weeks but will be back thereafter. Safe travels!
Photo By MOs810 (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons
