A Condor A320 aborted its Frankfurt landing seconds before curfew, diverting to Cologne and forcing passengers onto a long overnight bus ride.
Well, well, well... looks like those passengers are probably eligible for EU261 compensation and duty of care. In this case, looks like +3 hours late with that diversion and bus ride, travel distance under 1,500 km, so €250 per passenger. Condor can try to claim 'extraordinary circumstances,' but, the burden is on them to prove that, and it likely would fail as a defense to claims, because the delay was from their own scheduling issue, not 'severe weather' or something out of their control. Hmm.
Why that detour over the Ahr river? Was the pilot trying to draw a middle finger?
What they should do is have a hefty fine to discourage this but allow airlines to land within say 5 minutes of the curfew if they agree to pay x amount. It would be a win-win.
Oh, me thinks they’re already gonna be paying plenty in compensation to those passengers… thanks to EU261!
This was DEFINITELY a more environmentally-friendly alternative than just letting them land.
Isn't that 'curfew' less about the environment and more about noise abatement? Either way, yeah, they both burned more fuel and the low-altitude missed-approach was probably loud-ish, too.
You need to update the post. FRA has an actual curfew of 11pm and a grace period for late flights until midnight. The Condor flight wasnt seconds past the curfew, it was seconds past the grace period and over an hour past the curfew.
@ BeeDazzle -- Whoops, you're absolutely right. Just updated the post to reflect that, thanks!
Functionally though I think it's a bit potato, po-tah-to. If folks are going to be given clearance to take off to try and make it in time for "the grace period curfew" then it's functionally the curfew, no matter how it's legally defined.
Your point, I think, is that they never should have been allowed to even take off to "try and make it" if they never had a shot of landing by the 11pm curfew in the first place (or at least, I don't know, within the first half of the grace period?). Or why is ATC even routing a flight like this to FRA to try and make it with seconds to spare - have more of a cut-off of 11:50 or something like that for routings.
But this just seems like the worst of both worlds - ATC accommodating the routing and the pilots flying really fast to try and make it, they end up seconds from the airport, and then having to divert - what is the point of that? At that point they should be able to land regardless of what time it is.