Lufthansa had to cancel numerous flights on Wednesday, including all connections from Frankfurt at times. The reason was probably a glitch at Telekom. Frankfurt Airport was closed to all airlines for landings for hours. Around 200 flights were canceled. Tens of thousands of passengers were affected, and Lufthansa put together a crisis team. After several hours of closure, landings were possible again in Frankfurt in the afternoon.
According to Lufthansa, the systems for checking in passengers and handling the aircraft were no longer working. For example, if the check-in system fails, the company cannot understand which passengers are on board or not. The process has been done electronically for many years. Lufthansa emphasized that the failure was not safety-relevant for flight operations.
Excavator cuts fiber optic cable
When working on a railway line in Frankfurt, an excavator apparently severed several fiber optic cables. This affected, among other things, Telekom voice and Internet services in part of the city and west of Frankfurt. The airport and the flight operations center of Lufthansa are located there.
According to Deutsche Telekom, four fiber optic cables were damaged five meters deep on Tuesday evening during the construction work on behalf of the railways. A spokeswoman said Telekom technicians began replacing the cables straight away. According to Deutsche Bahn, “a cable in a cable bundle belonging to Telekom AG was severed by a contracted construction company around 7 p.m. at the construction site for line S6”.
The airline stated that a “complete elimination of the disruption will take until the afternoon”. Lufthansa initially canceled all flights from Frankfurt. There were also cancellations and delays at Berlin Airport BER, and passengers and planes were also backed up in Munich. The subsidiary Eurowings was also affected by the problems, and there were contradictory statements about the other group subsidiaries such as Swiss, Austrian and Brussels Airlines. At other airports, however, operations ran largely undisturbed, with the exception of flights to Frankfurt.
Frankfurt Airport temporarily closed
The German air traffic control (DFS) decided in the meantime to block the Frankfurt airport for landings of all airlines. The terminals had filled with waiting passengers, the apron with planes. Approaching machines were initially diverted to other airports, including Stuttgart, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Nuremberg. From about 1 p.m. onwards, machines landed in Frankfurt again after a few departures had freed up parking spaces on the ground. Lufthansa asked passengers on domestic flights to switch to the train. However, guests on many international flights were also informed that they would no longer have a chance of boarding on that day.
Even if the glitch could be fixed during the day, air traffic is likely to be severely disrupted for several more days. If such a disruption causes a large number of flights to be canceled and machines to land at the wrong place, it usually takes at least a day or two for the airlines to be able to ensure a normal flight plan again. The many planes have to be flown back to the right place. The crews who are assigned to follow-up flights are also in the wrong place and first have to get back to the airport where they were deployed. The Verdi services union has also announced a strike by its members at Frankfurt Airport for Friday.
Disturbances of this magnitude are extremely rare in aviation. But when they happen, they have a big impact. The Lufthansa partners United and British Airways were recently affected by such breakdowns. The American airline Southwest was heavily criticized because it took days after a heavy snowstorm to carry passengers on and processes such as hotel bookings did not work smoothly even during the acute crisis.