Hamburg Airport remains closed this evening after losing power this morning. Thus far, engineers have been unable to restore even partial power.
Around 1oam this morning (CET), an electrical short-circuit lurched Hamburg (HAM) into darkness. Both passenger terminals were evacuated.
By early afternoon, the issue had not been resolved and the airport cancelled flights for the rest of the day.
The airport is forced to suspend flight operations for the rest of today. It was not possible to correct the error.
Visit the airport’s website and you’ll be met with this simple message:
Due to a power failure incident the airport is currently closed. Please contact your airline.
Hamburg handles about 200 flights on Sundays (incoming and outgoing). Most incoming flights were diverted to Hanover, which is about 100 miles away.
Concerningly, the airport has offered no timeframe for when flights will resume, other than to promise as soon as possible. Apparently, the root problem has not been found and it may takes days (though hopefully not as long as it will take Berlin Brandenburg Airport to open…).
For passengers stranded, many of them short-haul, more frustrating than the flight cancellations themselves have been their inability to reclaim checked bags. That’s the only thing that is prohibiting many from just taking trains or alternate flights to their final destination.
image: Flor!an / Wikimedia Commons
Delta has blamed the utility provider 😛
It was definitely Qatari natural gas that caused the shutdown. 🙂
As far as I know United is the only U.S. airline that serves HAM (not ham). It looks like today’s flight did leave Newark en route to Hamburg, wonder where it will land if the airport is still shut down.
A saving grace is Germany’s highly efficient ICE rail network – Hannover to Hamburg is just over an hour by high-speed rail.
Anyone know what caused this, easyjet are saying it was a storm but we were in the area and there was no sign of any storms?