Heavy snowfall in the region prompted the cancellation of about 100 flights. For hundreds of passengers who had already boarded five different planes and were waiting for departure, the cancellation came too late.
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500 passengers were forced to spend the night aboard grounded aircraft
(Photo: Brocreative/ shutterstock)
Airport authorities were unable to return the aircraft to the terminal, leaving passengers stuck on the planes until early morning.
The episode first gained attention on social media and centered on Lufthansa flight LH2446 from Munich to Copenhagen. The flight, operated by an Airbus A320neo carrying more than 120 passengers, was scheduled to depart at 9:30 p.m. Passengers were transported to a remote stand, but after a series of delays, the flight was officially canceled shortly before midnight.
Around 2 a.m., passengers were informed there was no way back to the terminal. According to Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, crew members told passengers that no airport staff were available to assist and that, for safety reasons, they were not permitted to walk across the tarmac.
Passengers remained on short-haul narrow-body aircraft with limited food and drink and no blankets or pillows until buses evacuated them around 6 a.m.
German news agency DPA reported that the Copenhagen flight was not an isolated case. Roughly 500 passengers were stranded that night on five aircraft: three Lufthansa flights, to Singapore, Copenhagen and Gdansk, and two Air Dolomiti flights, to Graz and Venice.
Airport officials cited a shortage of available buses and full parking positions near the terminal as the main reasons passengers could not be transported back.
The situation was compounded by Munich Airport’s strict overnight curfew policy. The hours between midnight and 5 a.m. are designated as the “core night,” when severe restrictions apply to air operations, with only limited exceptions. Once flights were canceled shortly before midnight, operational options narrowed sharply as the curfew took effect.
A lack of available buses and full terminal stands meant that aircraft parked at remote positions could not be unloaded, forcing passengers to remain onboard until regular operations resumed in the morning.
“We told them we had to get off the plane and go to the terminal because we had two children with us,” said 49-year-old Danish passenger Søren Thime, who was traveling with his wife. He said crew members told passengers the airport was closed and that they could not reach anyone outside.
“Later they told us all the bus drivers had gone home and we were not allowed to leave the aircraft,” Thime said. “There was no food or drink, and no blankets. There were just a few bottles of water.”
Munich Airport said passengers could not be brought back to the terminal due to limited bus capacity and the lack of available parking positions near the terminal.
Lufthansa said it could not explain why buses were unavailable and stressed that organizing and operating buses on airport grounds is the responsibility of airport management.
For the stranded passengers, the ordeal ended at dawn. But their experience was not the only recent disruption in international air travel.
Last week, passengers on an All Nippon Airways flight from Tokyo to Frankfurt faced a different kind of nightmare. After takeoff, a problem was detected in one of the engines while the aircraft was flying over the Arctic and Alaska. Instead of diverting to a nearby airport, the plane turned back to Tokyo for operational reasons. After about 14 hours in the air, passengers landed where they had started, without getting any closer to their destination.