UNITED KINGDOM - Travel purgatory, Snowed-in planes delay British flights

LONDON (AP):

The Christmas travel season turned angry and chaotic on Monday as British officials struggled to clear snow and ice that paralysed rail and air links and spawned cancellations and delays stranding thousands around the world.

More than 48 hours after Britain's last snowfall, some furious passengers with boarding passes for Monday flights were not even allowed into London's Heathrow Airport. Inside, piles of garbage grew and some people slept on terminal floors.

Other travellers waited in the cold for up to six hours to get inside London's St Pancras train station, where they had to wait still longer for Eurostar trains to mainland Europe.

Chagrined British officials promised an inquiry into the failure to clear the remnants of a storm that dumped five inches over parts of England Saturday morning. Other European airports rebounded from weekend snowfall and resumed close-to-normal flight schedules on Monday.

"It can't be beyond the wit of man surely to find the shovels, the diggers, the snowplows or whatever it takes to clear the snow out from under the planes, to get the planes moving and to have more than one runway going," London Mayor Boris Johnson said as British Airways cancelled its short-haul schedule from Heathro on Monday.

severe winter weather

Forecasters have said Britain is experiencing some of the most severe winter weather in a century, with continued freezing temperatures and snowfall accumulations expected. Experts said the extreme winter weather may be related to climate change due to global warming. With a warmer climate, there is more moisture in the air, which makes storms including blizzards more intense.

Heathrow operator BAA said swings in temperature after the five-inch snowfall in one hour Saturday led to extensive ice build-up around aircraft on the ground. BAA said "every available" staff member and several hundred additional contractors were trying to get the airport moving again.

But BAA offered little hope of relief from travel purgatory, saying a maximum one-third of scheduled flights would be allowed to take off and land at Heathrow until today. The British government approved night-flight operations at Heathrow in an effort to remove the backlog, but officials warned it may take until after Christmas to do so, and longer if more snow falls.