Helen and Roman from Manchester should be heading home from New Zealand today after visiting family near the capital, Wellington. The couple have been told their Emirates flights via Dubai are cancelled and there is no clear timetable for getting them back to the UK; Helen is running short of medication.
Gwen and her husband are stranded in paradise – Bali, to be precise – with no certainty about when they might leave. “We can’t seem to get any contact with Emirates to be advised of another flight to the UK,” Gwen tells The Independent. She adds: “We don’t want to be stuck in Dubai at the airport. Can you update us on the position and offer any advice?”
They are just four of the hundreds of thousands of passengers who have been stranded by the unprecedented storm and flooding in Dubai.
On a typical day, 250,000 people pass through the world’s busiest international airport; Dubai overtook London Heathrow for this title several years ago.
But over the past 48 hours the vast majority have seen their flights cancelled, diverted or heavily delayed due to flooding.
Bizarrely, the way that air passengers’ rights rules are structured means that people who have yet to leave the country are in a far stronger position than those in far-flung corners of Asia, Australasia and Africa.
These are the key issues.
What’s the problem?
A severe storm began in the early hours of Tuesday 16 April. Dubai was drenched in a year and a half’s worth of rain in a single day, killing at least one person and disrupting travel through the airport that handles more international passengers than any other.
Flooding and associated disruption is continuing to cause widespread cancellations.
All airlines using Dubai International Airport affected, with British Airways flights from London Heathrow diverting in successive days to Bahrain and Abu Dhabi.
But passengers on Emirates – which flies more people on intercontinental journeys than any other airline – are collectively facing far bigger problems.
How bad are things?
A snapshot by The Independent of all the overnight Emirates departures due to arrive in Dubai from the UK on Thursday morning shows the scale of the problem. Bear in mind that most of the aircraft used are Airbus A380 “SuperJumbo”…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…