Flights chaos as fog blankets Liverpool and JLA

Nov 5 2007 by Caroline Innes, Liverpool Daily Post

Stranded passengers at Liverpool Airport try to find their way home as fog grounded flights (200)

THOUSANDS of passengers flying via Liverpool faced flight cancellations yesterday due to fog – less than a week after the airport launched its £2m new runway lighting system.

The first wave of flights had to be cancelled, rescheduled and diverted at Liverpool John Lennon Airport (JLA) as a result of the weather, leaving some passengers waiting 10 hours for alternative flights.

The first flights set off at 1.25pm but disruptions had left airport staff “playing catch up” with a backlog of travellers unable to reach their intended destinations.

In total, 27 flights were cancelled and 13 were subject to lengthy delays but by late afternoon, airport staff said things were “getting back to normal”.

The disruption came just days after two Premiership footballers launched the £2m runway lighting system to reduce the number of cancelled flights at the airport.

Everton defender Leighton Baines and Liverpool midfielder Ryan Babel switched on the new lighting for the runway and taxiway, which took six months to complete.

An airport spokesman said the new system would allow aircraft to taxi, take-off and land in extremely low levels of visibility, which previously would have resulted in cancelled flights.

And during the launch last Monday, Andy Gower, airport director, said: “As winter draws nearer and the weather can get poorer, this upgrade to the runway lighting system will help ensure that even fewer flights will be affected by any bad weather”.

But last night, Robin Tudor, spokesman for JLA, said the lighting system had paid dividends and things would have been much worse, had it not been installed.

He added: “We would have been much worse off without the new system.

“The fog was so thick that it didn’t matter how good a system of lighting we had – it was irrelevant.

“But as soon as it started to lift and there was an improvement in the visibility, the lighting worked.

“We were able to use the new system to get flights in sooner than we would have done previously.

“It really has paid dividends and got things moving much quicker than would have otherwise been possible.”

carolineinnes