Planes landed blindly

Smoke disrupted air traffic with Moscow

Dozens of flights were delayed or canceled due to smog hanging over Moscow. Since Thursday, hundreds of passengers have remained in the storage tanks of Domodedovo and Vnukovo airports. All the time, while smoke from fires hung over Moscow, Moscow airports ...

Dozens of flights were delayed or canceled due to smog hanging over Moscow. Since Thursday, hundreds of passengers have remained in the storage tanks of Domodedovo and Vnukovo airports.

All the while smoke from fires hung over Moscow, Moscow airports worked according to the actual weather, that is, they left the pilots to decide for themselves whether to land or go to an alternate airfield. As a result, according to the Federal Air Transport Agency, only on Friday the airports could not receive more than 40 flights and send another 20. Aircraft flying to Moscow landed in St. Petersburg, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh. And Russian Railways even launched an additional train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, designed for air passengers who did not reach the capital by air.

Sheremetyevo Airport was the luckiest of all: a cloud of smoke bypassed it, so the airport not only worked as usual, but also received flights from other airports. And Domodedov had the worst of it: according to the press service of the airport, on Friday morning, the pilots had to take off and land on instruments, that is, completely blind. On Saturday afternoon, there were rumors that the airport was closed for both arrivals and departures, but later the press service of the airport denied them. Nevertheless, by this time, dozens of unsent flights had already accumulated in Domodedovo.

However, the problem was not only in flight delays. It turned out that Domodedovo's ventilation system could not cope with the heat, and it was only in 2003 that it underwent a complete reconstruction. According to passengers, the temperature inside the waiting rooms turned out to be almost higher than outside, the windows and doors of the airport were open, and the halls were filled with smoke. Passengers waiting for their flights complained about stuffiness and heat, a bottle of mineral water for 100 rubles and the absence of food stamps required by law, not to mention free hotels.

“You can’t see anything further than 50 meters through the window,” user rainbow_six wrote on his blog. - The people are in darkness, there is really nowhere to sit, the air conditioners can not cope. What we rejoice about is that we are flying without children.”