LONDON: Heavy snow disrupted European air travel Saturday and stranded hundreds of drivers in their cars as far south as Italy as a white Christmas appeared increasingly likely for many places. In Britain national carrier British Airways scrapped all flights at the country's two busiest airports serving London. Low-cost carrier easyJet also cancelled all flights from Gatwick, Europe's eighth-busiest passenger airport. Elsewhere, Southampton Airport in southern England was closed due to the adverse weather, while flights to certain destinations from Birmingham Airport in the Midlands were also grounded. Passengers also faced disruptions at Exeter, London City, Aberdeen and Cardiff. Meanwhile Eurostar, which operates high-speed passenger trains linking London with Paris an 2d Brussels, was operating with speed restrictions that added up to an hour on journey times. Temperatures dropped as low as minus 13 degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) in Chesham, just north of London, overnight. Gatwick registered minus 11C (12F). In Lancashire, northwest England, hundreds of people had to spend the night in their vehicles after an accident blocked the main north-south motorway. Frankfurt airport, Germany's busiest, cancelled about 170 flights on Saturday because of the severe winter weather across Europe, an airport spokesman said. In Italy the Tuscany region was hardest hit, with hundreds of cars stuck on highways around Florence, where up to 20 centimetres of snow fell. High-speed trains between Milan, Florence and Rome were also cancelled, leaving some 5,000 passengers being sheltered in a conference hall in the Tuscan capital. The airports of Florence and Pisa were also closed. In western France several roads were closed as a new snowstorm began to sweep across the country towards Paris, and heavy trucks were barred in many regions. In the Bordeaux region five people were hurt on a motorway when a 38-tonne truck ploughed into two vans whose drivers had lost control on black ice, and then caught fire. A fourth vehicle then crashed into the wreckage. – Agence France
