Travellers celebrate Christmas Eve in airports

If you are travelling in parts of Europe this Christmas, you may be reading this in some airport terminal or train station as the bad weather has thwarted holiday plans for thousands.

Paris’s airports were home for Christmas Eve for many unwilling guests, largely due to a lack of de-icing fluid, and many were furious.

“I’m desperately sorry for them, for the Air France staff, for all these conflicts we’ve created and the problems, and I can assure you, I haven’t seen anything like this in 10 years,” said Air France’s Roissy Head of Operations Michel Emeyriat.

In Brussels hundreds of beds have been made available by the Red Cross and army for stranded passengers. Not a single plane landed for most of Thursday, and departures were slow. Few there can remember such bad weather in December, and there is growing indignation as to how the authorities in so many countries seem to have been caught on the hop.

“I feel very lousy, it’s the first time in my life that I want to spend Christmas with my grandchildren and I can’t do it now. And it’s bad,” said one American tourist.

London had been bedly hit but is recovering, and has even produced some seasonal cheer, as a choir stuck in Washington DC for the last week arrived home in time for Christmas, and serenaded the travellers.

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