Around 500 passengers were forced to spend the night on grounded planes at an airport in Germany (AI-Generated Image)
Munich Airport Chaos: About 500 people ended up spending the night stuck on planes at a German airport, according to several reports.
German newspaper Bild said 123 passengers were supposed to fly from Munich to Copenhagen with Lufthansa on Thursday, Feb. 19. Instead, they spent eight hours trapped on the plane.
Other Lufthansa flights had the same problem, along with two Air Dolomiti flights headed to Austria and Italy. All told, around 500 people got stranded overnight on the tarmac.
A Lufthansa spokesperson said, “Due to severely limited apron buses, passengers on three Lufthansa flights (Singapore, Copenhagen, Gdansk) and two Air Dolomiti flights (Graz, Venice) couldn’t leave the aircraft.”
The Copenhagen flight was set to leave at 9:30 p.m. local time. Passengers had already boarded when staff announced a delay because of heavy snow.
For the next two and a half hours, announcements kept coming, but around midnight, the flight was finally cancelled.
The plane was parked far from the terminal, and there weren’t any buses to bring people back. Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet reported that every half hour, passengers were told staff were trying to find buses for them.
Then, at 2 a.m., airline staff suddenly told everyone they couldn’t reach anyone inside the airport—the place was closed. Munich has a night flight ban from midnight until 5 a.m., so nobody could move.
Søren Thieme, who was travelling with his family and young kids, said they were told all the bus drivers had gone home and nobody was allowed to leave the plane. “There must be something we can do. We can just go to the airport, we ask. But we’re not allowed to. It’s forbidden, we’re told. We’re simply trapped here, along with the staff too,” he told reporters.
Thieme added that his family had just flown back from a vacation in Thailand, and this Munich-to-Copenhagen flight was supposed to be their last hop home.
“We were really frustrated,” he said. “We’ve been on the road for over 24 hours now. We should have been home in Denmark and asleep by now. But the flight crew was also completely at a loss. We also don’t get to know when they expect us to be able to get out.”
Finally, early in the morning, buses and stairs showed up and everyone could get off the plane. Thieme’s family got booked onto a new flight, but that one was delayed by another hour.
“We’re home in Denmark now, and it’s nice to be home. At one point, I wondered if we’d make it back at all this weekend,” he said.
Lufthansa apologized in a statement, explaining that unexpected heavy snow on Feb. 19 severely restricted operations at Munich Airport. Late that evening, flights that were ready for takeoff lost their clearance at the last minute.
Five planes had to move to outdoor parking, since there wasn’t any space at Terminal 2. Crews kept passengers updated and handed out what food and drinks they had.
The planes stayed heated and powered, but it took hours to get buses out to the planes so people could finally leave. Lufthansa said, “We sincerely apologize to all our passengers for this unacceptable situation. Together with our partners at Munich Airport, we’re doing everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
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