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

I'm currently sitting in Paddington in central London, watching the slow melting of the snow into slush

and, well, just assessing what has happened in the past 48 hours in the UK. Goodness me, it's been a

terrible time to be an airline passenger. Let me run past you what I think has been happening so far.

Well, we saw somebody dragging something through the slush. I'm not quite sure exactly what.

It was Saturday morning, the 10th of December, when things started to unravel in terms of aviation.

There was a cold snap at Manchester Airport, some snow. Depends who you talk to. The airport said it was a heavy

snowfall. Some of the people who live near the airport say, no, it wasn't. Anyway, whatever it was,

they closed the both runways. It's all to do with adhesion. You've got to have the ability

of the aircraft to stop and if you're concerned about it then you divert planes and

my goodness they were diverted one from incoming from houston ended up in Paris we had other flights

in Amsterdam scattering around the London airports and even one to Glasgow. That was Saturday and that was messy.

But I thought we were going to recover from it. However, on Sunday morning at Gatwick Airport,

second busiest in Britain after Heathrow, well, there were problems with de-icing aircraft. That's, of course, an essential thing to do

before they are allowed to take off because you cannot have ice on the wings. It destroys the

aerodynamics of the aircraft. So that has to be done. And if you don't have enough de-icing rigs,

then things are going to go slow and

you're going to see some cancellations let's move across to heath row what was happening there

well freezing fog that was what was happening therefore the flow rate number of arrivals coming

into heath row was approximately half from its maximum and that led to cancellations too.

Oh, back at Gatwick, we've now got snow falling, we're going to close the runway diversions on an extraordinary scale.

One poor plane from Pisa, an easy jet arrival, hung around over the English Channel, trying to get into Gatwick,

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