“Flights leaving from Bristol Airport this morning have been grounded following snowfall overnight,” says the failing Bristol Post via its piss-poor clickbait website, with news and updates cribbed entirely from other websites and social media. A better story, perhaps, would have been to actual do some journalism and find out how things are at Bristol Airport this morning, but as this does’t appear to be all over social media just yet, I suppose we must make do with what we’re being told. It can’t be fun, though.
On a back of a fag packet calculation, some 20 flights were due to depart Bristol before 8.00am and quite a few more as the morning went on. Not one has left yet (it’s 11.00am as I write) and the departures lounge must be heaving. Some poor folk – well, not poor in the financial sense, obvs – will have been at the airport since 4.00am, maybe even before. I doubt that even the obligatory crack-of-dawn £8 a pint will have drowned anyone’s sorrows.
We are given no explanation as to why Bristol, alone across airports in the UK, is halted. Surely, it would be easy enough to establish the facts, not just the simple fact that it’s been snowing bit also because the airport is is built on a hill and therefore more likely to be affected by this type of weather. But no, nothing.
I tried to make a comparison with Cardiff Airport and it turns out they only had one flight departure this morning, but then that was the only flight scheduled this morning. There’s nothing else scheduled to depart or arrive this morning so a comparison would be irrelevant. No point in suspending flights when there aren’t any to suspend. I have a feeling that maybe, just maybe, Bristol has issues because the weather around here today is pretty shit.
My thoughts are with those good folk in departures, not least those travelling to Cyprus who appear to be travelling by road. Let’s just hope they make it before the return flight leaves sometime next week. Thanks as ever to Bristol Live for keeping up with events in their normal way, which is basically not at all.
