London Heathrow, where passengers have been forced to sleep on terminal floors during four days of chaos, cancelled two thirds of flights while Frankfurt closed for several hours after more snow fell overnight.

Long queues snaked outside the London terminal for the Eurostar train link between Britain, France and Belgium.

In Germany, frustration boiled over as a man killed his neighbour with a snow shovel.

In Brussels, the European Commission said it had summoned airport officials from around the continent to a meeting in coming days to seek explanations and "take a hard look" at ways of dealing with extreme weather in future.

"I am extremely concerned about the level of disruption to travel across Europe caused by severe snow. It is unacceptable and should not happen again," European transport commissioner Siim Kallas said.

British airport operator BAA defended itself against heavy criticism for the continuing closure of the second runway at Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport, despite the last major snowfall having been on Saturday.

Chief executive Colin Matthews said passengers should only come to the airport if their flight was confirmed, but added: "If it is, come to the airport and we will do our absolute best to give you a great experience."

Passengers queuing in the cold outside Heathrow's Terminal 3 were unimpressed by his comments.

"I think this hurts the reputation of the whole country. The airport is the first experience you have and this is not a good experience," Gustaf Malmstrom, 23, told AFP as he tried for a fifth day to get a flight to Stockholm.

"I have worked at an airport in Sweden and I've never seen such an unprofessional way of treating passengers as I have here."

The terminal was only letting in people who were flying on Tuesday morning, mainly on flights to Asia, while others had to queue outside. Airport workers handed out silver blankets and set up two heated marquees.

Gatwick, London's second airport, reopened its runway at 6:00 GMT although further delays and cancellations were inevitable, a spokesman said.

Eurostar said it was running a restricted service and asked all customers booked to travel before Christmas to refund or exchange their tickets free of charge if their journey is not essential.

The queue of passengers stretched for more than a kilometre around the imposing St Pancras station, although it seemed to be moving faster than on previous days.

"This is the longest queue I have been in in my life," said George Gow, 20, an American student, trying to get to Paris.

Volunteers from the Salvation Army -- a charity which normally helps the homeless in Britain -- handed out cups of tea and coffee to those waiting in the cold.

In Germany, fresh snowfall caused gridlock at the country's main airport Frankfurt with no flights taking off or landing for around three and a half hours in the morning.

By the time it reopened at around 0800 GMT, 300 of the 1,300 daily flights at Europe's third-largest airport were cancelled, a spokesman told AFP, while others were diverted to Munich in southern Germany.

More than 1,000 travellers spent the night at Frankfurt airport, which laid out camp beds and distributed drinks, sandwiches and soft buttered pretzels.

Meanwhile a German man smashed his neighbour over the head with a shovel, killing him on the spot, after a heated argument over who was responsible for removing snow from the joint entrance to their properties.

The victim, a father of two, "was so badly injured that he died on the spot," Lutz Flassnoecker, a police spokesman, following the attack in the tiny town of Schnellenbach, western Germany.

In France, authorities allowed the two main airports in Paris, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, to remain open around the clock to clear the backlog of delayed flights.

One hundred civil security personnel had been sent on Monday evening with 300 beds and 2,500 blankets for those still stranded at Charles de Gaulle.

A strike by airport security staff in the southern city of Marseille -- although it was spared the snow -- caused further chaos.

earlier related report
Heathrow snow chaos shames Britain, say travellers
London (AFP) Dec 21, 2010 - Passenger Alexander Valdarama has spent the last two nights sleeping on the floor at Heathrow airport on a foam mattress hand-out.

"It's been a terrible experience. I've been flying for more than 20 years and something like this has never happened," said Valdarama, from Manila in the Philippines, told AFP.

He spent his first night in a hotel paid for by the airline but the taxi there cost him 90 pounds (140 dollars, 106 euros) so for the last two nights the floor has been his only option.

Valdarama is just one of thousands stranded at the airport, and whether they hail from Asia, Africa, Europe or the Americas, all agree that the chaos is the worst they have seen anywhere.

The 47-year-old seaman has been sleeping at Heathrow's flagship Terminal 5, which caters mainly for British Airways, since the cancellation on Saturday of his flight to Belgium, where he was due to join a ship's crew.

In sharp contrast however to the chaotic scenes at the weekend when blizzards shut both runways, the mood was relatively calm at the terminal as airport workers handed out boxes containing sandwiches, cake and cartons of water.

Passengers appeared to heed calls by Colin Matthews, the beleaguered boss of British airport authority BAA, to stay away unless their flight had been confirmed. About two-thirds of flights at Heathrow were cancelled on Tuesday.

But it was a far cry from the "great experience" promised by Matthews to those who did come to the airport.

In the same terminal was a family of seven, including three children, who left Malaysia on Friday for a skiing holiday in Switzerland, but found all connecting flights cancelled. They had to fork out for four nights at a hotel.

"This is our Christmas present. It looks like we'll have to cancel our holiday," said Mokhtar Azhan, 32.

Christine Townsend, a German woman living in Vancouver, said she had been trying to get to her mother's 70th birthday in Frankfurt last Friday -- but with the airport there closed, followed by Heathrow, she was stranded.

"I've felt like a homeless person," she said, adding that she spent the first night in a hotel, then two nights at the home of a couple who offered her a bed, and the previous night on the terminal floor.

"I don't have a cellphone that works internationally. I have no laptop and my credit card was cancelled because I'm in the wrong country. So I have no money, I feel completely stranded and hopeless."

She abandoned her trip and hoped to fly home to Vancouver Thursday.

Hundreds of people meanwhile had to queue in the cold outside Terminal 3, where staff were limiting access to the departure lounge to all those with tickets for Tuesday.

And in Terminal 4, dozens of Nigerian travellers trying to get home on Arik Air were becoming desperate.

Kelvin, a 27-year-old studying in the central English city of Coventry, had been trying for two days to get to Abuja for his wedding.

"I'm supposed to be getting married on the 26th. I told the airline staff but they don't care about it. I've given up, I've got my bus ticket back to Coventry and I've postponed the wedding," he told AFP.

Grim faced, he gave only his first name before retiring to a quiet corner to call his fiancee to give her the bad news.

In the same area, a woman who was four months pregnant complained that she had been left sleeping on coats on the floor and without any food.

"We feel very cheated and very disappointed," added 21-year-old Idayat Ishona, who is studying computer science in Portsmouth, southeast England, and was trying to visit her family in Lagos.

After five days spent sleeping on the terminal floor she was close to tears. "Right now I just want to get home, I just want to get to Nigeria. It's terrible," she said.

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News