Manchester beats the big freeze

Manchester Airport 1  Rest of the country 0.

The snowfall up in the north west of England was a little more kind than in London and down south, however, whilst thousands of people had to rearrange or cancel their winter trips this festive season, Manchester Airport managed to stay head and shoulders above the rest, much to the delight of the north western holidaymakers.

This year’s success has to go down to lessons learnt from last year’s big chill when many passengers were met with big delays. Full praise needs to go to Manchester airports dedicated staff and the decision to spend over £2m on new snow ploughing equipment and grit trucks, They also doubled their stock of anti-icer in a bid to keep planes flying. Engineers are now on standby around the clock to help keep operations running. By Tuesday morning the airport said it had used 606,500 litres of de-icing fluid and cleared around 50,000 cubic metres of snow from the airfield.

An airport spokeswoman said "It’s a real achievement to keep the airport moving – so the staff deserve a big pat on the back.

"We have learned a lot from last year in terms of the snow – we’ve invested in new ploughing equipment, grit trucks and extra anti-icer. We are not doing anything dramatically different to Heathrow – but the biggest difference is that we’ve had less snow.

"Heathrow is 100 per cent full, 100 per cent of the time. When they have a busy period like Christmas it only takes an hour of disruption to ripple through – we have the luxury of capacity to allow us to recover more quickly."

Some passengers have faced delays from Manchester Airport, but only because of delays at Heathrow airport and Gatwick airport.

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