To create a detailed account of how Sofia airport functioned during January 3 and 4 2009, the most "problematic" weekend since the beginning of the year, the report would probably resemble a Morse Code message to the unenlightened.

Dots and dashes of conflicting information would appear, interrupted by long pauses of discontent and complaints, dispersing as bad energy in the atmosphere. Yet surprisingly enough, the message still comes across as clear, because there is strong logic that binds it together.

During the two days when the heavy snowfalls occurred, Bulgarian-language media kept providing reports that the airport was operating as usual, quoting the airport's management and information posted on its official website. In reality, however, many international and domestic flights were re-directed to land in other cities abroad and in Bulgaria, with passengers being transported to Sofia one or two days later, either at the airport's expense or from passengers' own pockets. Departure and arrival flights were delayed by up to seven hours, while the airport operated on an open-closed mode and found it hard to cope with the continuous snowfalls.

Bulgarian-language daily 24 Chassa (24 hours) said that during the evening of January 4 2009, its newsroom phones were jammed with calls from people who were supposed to board a Bulgaria Air flight from Varna to Sofia the same day. The flight was cancelled and the newspaper quoted the airline's CEO Dimitar Pavlov as explaining that "we did not depart because while all passengers were seated in the aircraft waiting for the aircraft to be de-iced, heavy snowfalls began..."

The daily also referred to carriers saying the airport had only one aircraft rank where the planes were being de-iced. Therefore, if there was a line-up of 15 aircraft, the first one would be delayed by 15 minutes, but the last one would be several hours behind schedule.

Because of the 24-hour uninterrupted snowfalls, the runway was closed and opened seven times on January 3 and 4, which left 40-minute windows in between for landings and take-offs, the paper quoted Plamen Stanchev, the airport's CEO as saying. On that Saturday in question, 16 aircraft had landed at alternative airports, including Bucharest and Thessaloniki, when some of them awaited clearance from Sofia and landed there with significant delays. Others, like two flights of the low-cost carrier easyJet coming from Madrid and London, landed in Romania and Greece and it took two days for their 270 passengers to reach Sofia in buses provided by the Bulgarian airport.

Stanchev, as quoted by the media, said that all passengers from the Madrid flight "got lucky" for their plane having landed in Thessaloniki, where easyJet had a regional office. All passengers then were accommodated in a company hotel to spend the night. Stanchev was quoted as saying it was unclear to him why the easyJet pilots had decided against landing in Sofia when the runway had been clean and the visibility acceptable. In the same time period when the flight from London refused to land in Sofia, seven planes successfully arrived in Sofia, Stanchev said.

During that snowy weekend there were no cancelled flights, only several more significant delays, Stanchev said. He said that whether a plane would land at a specific airport was a decision made by the pilot.

Some travellers have lodged court action against easyJet seeking compensation. Meanwhile, Focus news agency reported that the company issued a statement apologising for the inconvenience, saying that weather conditions were beyond its control and that easyJet had coped with the situation as well as it could. The carrier said that it had to re-direct flights on January 3 because Sofia Airport was closed. According to available information, Sofia Airport was closed from 6pm on January 3 until the following morning.

"Closing the airport due to weather conditions is not the real problem, because this happens around the world," commented Spas Vassilev, a reader of The Sofia Echo, who contacted us with information about flight delays, which he found on the airport's website, as well as offering his opinion about what he perceived to be a chaotic situation.

Stanchev told The Sofia Echo that he could not agree that the airport was in a chaotic state during that weekend. Even with such gridlock, all the airport's departments were functioning at their peak, he said. Responding to whether old or insufficient equipment was exacerbating flight delays and re-direction, Stanchev said that, according to the serviced land area, the equipment the airport had at its disposal was sufficient, new and expensive.

Vassilev said that for at least seven years he had worked at various European airports, but what he could not understand was how the Bulgarian media quoted the airport's management as saying that everything was in normal operational mode, without making the effort to verify it.

"It would have been more plausible if someone from the management had come forward to honestly admit that they were using all of their resources available to tackle with the situation, that the technical equipment was insufficient or too old. Because, if we all believe that everything was `normal', would anything ever be improved?"
During the weekend of January 3 and 4, a total of 136 flights were serviced, carrying about 30 000 passengers.