After flooding, Dubai airport in chaos. Flights canceled or endlessly delayed
The Emirates website makes like nothing else: the homepage opens with 'Discover the wonders of Perth,' [...]
Flydubai
Emirates
VCE
United Arab Emirates
Emirates website makes like it's nothing: The homepage opens with 'Discover the wonders of Perth,' welcomes the user, and then proceeds with the usual stuff. That of the other home airline, Flydubai, does the same, opening with a 480 euro 'Fly non-stop to Dubai'. No warning, no alert.
In this article:
But 'fly non-stop to Dubai', or 'from Dubai' we would add, Is in these hours impossible or almost impossible. Everyone on the day of Tuesday, April 16, saw on social videos of flooded city streets and the airport turned into a swimming pool, with Flydubai's own 737 MAX recklessly making its way through the waters as if it were a new Moses.
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Sure, in Dubai the rainfall of a year and a half fell in a few hours (or, at least, that's what we were told). But it is also true that if you cement and asphalt everything, as they have done in Dubai (and elsewhere) for the past fifteen years, how do you drain water when it rains a little more than usual?
And indeed, torrential rains passed, in the aftermath (i.e., today, April 17) the situation does not appear to have improved, as far as flooding. And Dubai airport, where hundreds of flights had already been canceled or delayed on Tuesday, plunged into chaos today, when Emirates has announced that no check-in operations will take place from 8 a.m. until midnight today, April 17. This is because high water on the runways, which have been transformed into a copy of pre-Mose St. Mark's Square, makes loading luggage into the aircraft holds impossible.
The images you see accompanying this article, which were given to us by the sent in by a desperate reader of The Flight Club (thank you, by the way!), show a Terminal 3 that not even in Mecca during the peak of the pilgrimage: a carpet of heads and bodies stretches as far as the eye can see near one of the dedicated passenger info-points. "We're sort of in limbo, we can't pick up our bags and we can't leave the airport because the city, we were told, is in some sort of lockdown. We had a connecting flight to the Maldives, but it's blown and no one can tell us what will happen in the next few hours."
Another reader wrote to us that he extended his stay by one day, as he could not even reach it, the airport.
In fact, at least According to reports from Flightradar24 and in relation to Emirates operations over Italy, not all flights were canceled. But the delays are very heavy: the EK205 Dubai-Milan (the one that then continues from Malpensa to New York's JFK as EK206) had a scheduled departure time of 9:15 a.m. this morning, but takeoff is now scheduled for 6:39 p.m., which is more than nine hours later; the other flight to Milan, EK91 scheduled for 3:45 p.m. will leave (maybe, who knows) at 5:45 p.m.
Same delay (nine hours) expected for EK97 Dubai-Rome., who was scheduled to leave the Emirate at 9:10 this morning, While EK95 is given with a two-hour delay (And even then maybe, who knows). Instead, the 9:20 a.m. EK 93 Dubai-Bologna was canceled.to, while EK193 to Venice made it, despite taking off at 3:20 p.m. instead of 9:05 a.m.
FlyDubai, for his part, has directly canceled its two flights to Bergamo, the one to Naples and the one to Catania, while the flight to Pisa took off at 10:32 a.m. more than three hours late.
In short, a very difficult situation that will affect the operations of the two Dubai companies for days on end. That is, if the weather is clement, as it thankfully pre be, at least according to weather.com's 10-day forecast.
Obviously, the advice to all readers of The Flight Club, is to inquire well in advance about the operation of their flights to and from Dubai in the coming days.