Thunderstorm in Barcelona, 2 flights diverted to Palma Airport
Friday, July 11th, 2014
The massive thunderstorm that affected the Catalan coast on Monday this week forced fifteen outbound flights from Barcelona to cancel, according to the sources at Aena.
Four flights had to divert, two of them to Palma airport, on their way to Barcelona Airport and the other two flights to Girona airport.
The Airlines cancelled the fifteen planned departures during the day from Barcelona airport, and many airlines ran flights behind schedule due to storm.
The following day Barcelona airport scheduled a total of 945 arrivals and departures, catching up lost flights.
More news from Barcelona
A near collision in Barcelona’s airport Saturday morning.
Blame is pointed towards human error with possibly the air traffic controllers or the air crews at fault.
The air traffic controllers might have been the cause for the incident which almost led to a collision of an Argentinian airliner and a Russian aeroplane during the landing at Barcelona’s airport.
A top expert source in Russia’s air traffic controllers’ circles voiced his opinion, commenting the “The plane approaching to land always has priority and nothing shall detain it,â€
What happened in Barcelona airport
On one video published on the internet, it can be seen how the Argentinian jet is taxiing for take-off and is crossing the take-off runway at the same moment when Russia’s UTair airliner is already landing and almost touching ground.
The Russian pilots decided to suspend landing and proceeded into the go-around mode, when they noticed the other plane on the landing strip.
One comment that can be heard on the video saying that the gap between the planes was more than 1 km, although from the pictures it looked no more than a few meters.
Fault of the controllers or crews
The Russian expert stressed, “However, even upon the video footage it can be said that there was either a controllers’ fault, or a mistake of the Argentinian plane’s crew that for some reason misheard the controllers’ command,â€
Whatever was the catalyst to the chain of event on Saturday morning, passengers can be thankful that the quick reactions from the Russian air crew stopped a hazardous situation happening at the Barcelona landing strip.
The latest cases of collisions in airports
Two passenger airliners of Ireland’s Ryanair carrier collided while maneuvering in an incident in London’s Stansted airport in June 2014. Nobody was hurt, the passengers from both planes were evacuated,  but due to the incident the flights at Stansted were delayed for three hours.
In October 2013, two Airbuses of the Turkish Airlines collided in Istanbul’s Ataturk airport during maneuvering. Both planes were damaged but none of the passengers or crew members were injured.
In New York’s JFK airport in March 2013, a plane of the US-based JetBlue air carrier stopped on the taxiway strip because the push-back tug that was driving it to the take-off runway had some technical issues, and a plane of Air India collided with it.
JetBlue’s plane suffered minor damage, and the 150 passengers were put on another jet.
