Hello and welcome to the daily independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

Last one of the week, Friday the 20th of January, and I hope you've had a great week,

but I know for a fact that many thousands of passengers who were caught up in the, well,

chaos involving Manchester Airport on Thursday morning probably didn't.

I want to talk about what happened when the airport closed, how the airlines reacted and what your rights are.

So this was the second time in two months that Manchester Airport temporarily closed because of wintry weather.

Now they talked about heavy snowfall on Thursday morning as the reason.

And once again, people in the area were saying, was it really that heavy?

Well, it was clearly heavy enough.

There's very strict rules about adhesion.

And therefore, when it's snowing when things are ice up then the airline airport may need to close and we had just planes going everywhere.

The last one in from Banjol was I, about shortly before half past five.

And after that, well, it all went wrong.

We had flights from Abu Dhabi, Atlanta, Barbados, Doha, Dubai, Montego Bay, New York, all diverted.

And they went to places like Birmingham, Dublin, Liverpool,

Gatwick and Heathrow. So not quite as bad as last time when some ended up in Paris and

Amsterdam, but still pretty disruptive. Now, the airlines kept doing what they could to try

and make sure that passengers could get where they needed to be.

And I was watching the Aer Lingus flight coming in from Barbados to Manchester.

A few, flew a few circuits and then they just said, right, we're off, we're heading for Dublin, where they sat on the ground.

And the good thing was that because, of course,

Air Lingus is headquartered in Dublin,

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