Snow still halts travel at Heathrow

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Thousands of passengers remain stranded at London’s Heathrow airport since a snowstorm hit the area last Saturday. Other European airports, however, have managed to keep planes moving despite the snow. That’s prompted the question – why can’t Heathrow? Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Tom Hall, a travel editor with the Lonely Planet. Download MP3

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World. Heathrow is the most travelled airport in Europe and one of the busiest in the world. Not this week, though. As you no doubt heard, Heathrow airport has become a giant, snowy airplane parking lot. Thousands of passengers have been stranded as the airport grounded most scheduled flights since the snow storm hit last Saturday. The question many people are asking though is: “Why?”. Tom Hall is a travel editor with the Lonely Planet. Tom, passengers flying through other European hubs seem to have fared a lot better in this storm than those flying through Heathrow. How come?

TOM HALL: It’s astonishing really, to be talking about Heathrow having ground to a halt quite so spectacularly as it has done. Heathrow being London’s airport, and London being a city which is actually fairly mild when it comes to weather has historically been struck by heavy snow far less than say airports in New York would have been. I think, in the time I was growing up in London, I’m 33 years old and grew up in London and I think it snowed once every three or four years for a couple of days and didn’t really cause too much damage. In the last four years we’ve had multiple snow falls of much greater intensity that have lingered for longer and been accompanied by much lower temperatures than I think I’ve seen in my entire life. We are in the middle of a real run of cold spells here. But because we haven’t had these cold spells in the past, London’s airports don’t have the sophisticated equipment that you might find, for example at Scandinavian airports for dealing with this kind of temperatures. So, simply, we can’t cope.

MULLINS: Except, there are some airports around Heathrow that are indeed coping. I mean, it may not be business as usual, but at least flights are getting in and out.

HALL: Yes. You know, London Gatwick airport, which obviously is serving the same city just on the other side of town has coped a lot better. And if you look across Europe, we can see Frankfurt, Charles de Gaulle in Paris and Amsterdam Schiphol all being hit by the same incidents but seemingly coping with it a lot better. So, surprising as it may seem, it does seem that once again Heathrow has caught a cold in a cold snap.

MULLINS: But, it seems today that the British airport authority refuse the help of the army to help dig it out of this mess. The army was offering to plow through at least one runway and Heathrow officials said no. Why not just get some soldiers with shovels in there?

HALL: I think it’s a feeling that, in order to get the runway properly cleared and safe, it wouldn’t be sufficient to have soldiers out there with shovels no matter how tough and well trained and willing to help they are. I think you need, you know, things like deicing equipment; you need specific snow plows, specific machinery that can make sure it’s completely safe. As bad as this situation is, a worse situation would be for a plane to come in to land, skid on the ice and then to be some sort of incident. So, safety is the primary concern there.

MULLINS: They really don’t have access to that kind of heavy equipment?

HALL: They don’t have access to enough of that equipment. The transport secretary in the UK, Philip Hammond, was talking about whether we need to view what’s going on at the moment given that it has happened several years in succession as a step change in Britain’s weather or in London’s weather meaning that there is a case for investment in this kind of equipment. At the moment, somewhere like Stockholm’s Arlanda airport has a fleet of very, very large numbers of these plows which can clear a runway in six minutes. We’re probably looking at six days to get everything up and running here at Heathrow and I can understand why people are saying that it doesn’t really sound acceptable.

MULLINS: Thank you. Tom Hall, travel editor with Lonely Planet based in London and hopefully planning to stay put. Tom, we’re thinking of you.

HALL: Thank you.

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