Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 18th of April.

Though if you happen to be one of the passengers who is stranded, either getting to, from or at Dubai International Airport, you're probably wondering what day it is.

Hundreds of thousands of people have seen their travel plans torn up.

This all began in the early hours of Tuesday morning with an apocalyptic storm.

It brought a year and a half's worth of

rainfall in just a few hours to Dubai and other parts of the Middle East. But of course,

this being the main departure point and arrival point for, well, effectively the entire

world between the western and the eastern hemispheres. It struck

Dubai particularly hard. Emirates, which flies more passengers intercontinental than any other

carrier is worst hit. Of course, they are trying to recover the operation today, but just to give you a snapshot of where we are and how far we are from normal life, I've just been taking a look at the overnight arrivals at Dubai from the UK, just to give you some flavour of how bad things are.

So we've had six Emirates flights cancelled,

three from Heathrow, one from Stansted, one from Birmingham, one from Glasgow. Bear in mind,

these are all, and mostly all, Airbus A380 super jumbo planes carry more than 500 passengers each.

So that's about 3,000 people who did not arrive in Dubai as

expected today and crucially of course because the flight out of Dubai didn't take off a similar

number stuck in Dubai. The rest of the flights while they were all delayed the minimum was two hours

that was a single flight from

Heathrow the maximum six hours and that affected passengers from Heathrow again from Gatwick

from Glasgow and from Manchester in Dubai if you did get there your problems could just be

beginning there's an awful lot of people stuck there. Hundreds of flights are delayed.

Onward connections on Emirates to destinations such as Colombo in Sri Lanka, the Seychelles,

...