Six flights diverted at Palma airport due to fog
Thursday, August 28th, 2014
Son Sant Joan airport yesterday was a morning of delays and diversions for certain flights due to heavy fog.
The dense fog settled at around 06:00am at the head of the Palma airport runways. This caused six international flights to divert, two to Menorca and four to Ibiza. Two other flights between Menorca and Mallorca had to cancel.
As the morning progressed to about 9:00am the airport had gradually returned to normal.
According to sources at Palma airport safety procedures were enforced due to the fog, which meant that flights were controlled slightly differently to ensure that the take-off or landing times were considerably larger than usual.
Three flights operating between Menorca and Mallorca were affected by the unusual weather phenomenon. Two of these inter-island links had to cancel, a departure and an arrival.
Passengers affected by this were relocated to other flights, according to sources of AENA.
When the weather changes in Spring from cold temperatures to very hot this can sometimes result in a thick humidity, especially fog if the sea temperatures remain cold.
The high humidity in August and the hot in-land temperatures can contribute to a similar phenomenon, when a layer of cooler coastal air is trapped beneath a layer of warm drier air, fog may appear suddenly.
If you are planning to arrive in Mallorca in August, the hottest month of the year, average daytime temperatures along the coast will be 30-31°C.
Aeroplane breakdown at take-off in Ibiza, causes three diversions to Palma Airport
A Vueling flight to Madrid, from Ibiza, caused an incident earlier this month on a Saturday night at 00:10 hours. When it started to take-off the aircraft suffered a brake failure and stopped on the runway with all the passengers inside, although no accident occurred according AENA.
They waited 40 minutes before being able to return to the terminal as the aeroplane was stuck on the runway. The aircraft had to stay in Ibiza to be repaired, but the passengers who were heading to Madrid could travel on another plane from Vueling.
Three aircraft approaching to land on the island during this time had to divert to Palma airport being unable to land anywhere at Ibiza’s Es Codolar airport.
All the flights were EasyJet aircraft. Two of them came from English airports in Liverpool and London. The third originated from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Throughout the early hours of the morning, these flights could finally land in Ibiza after they were rescheduled.
