Birmingham Airport delays continue after closure

Birmingham Airport's runway was closed after a plane made an emergency landing

Passengers continue to face hours of delays following the closure of Birmingham Airport's runway, after a plane was forced to make an emergency landing.

The runway was shut on Wednesday afternoon when the small aircraft returned to the airport after it's landing gear failed on a flight to Belfast.

It remained closed for more than six hours while staff worked to remove the plane, with thousands of airline passengers stranded or diverted.

The runway reopened after 19:30 BST, when the plane was moved. The first flight departed shortly after, having originally been scheduled to leave at 14:10.

Is Birmingham Airport open and are there delays?

In a notice on its website, Birmingham Airport said it was now "operating to its normal schedule" but warned that passengers might face some residual delays.

The online departures list on Thursday morning showed several flights leaving later than scheduled.

The 05:55 BST Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, for example, departed at 09:57, while the 06:30 TUI service to Kefalonia was estimated to take off at about 12:30.

Other flights have experienced shorter delays, ranging from about 35 minutes to a couple of hours.

What happened and was anyone injured?

According to aircraft charter and management company, Woodgate Aviation, one of its Beechcraft fixed-wing planes developed landing gear problems on its journey to Belfast after taking off from Birmingham at 13:11.

The aircraft returned to Birmingham, landing at 13:58.

"The aircraft returned to Birmingham and made an emergency landing and the main undercarriage collapsed on touch down," the company said.

It confirmed two crew members and one passenger were on board but were not injured.

West Midlands Police, West Midlands Fire Service and Birmingham Airport Police were among the agencies at the scene.

Birmingham Airport said its teams worked as quickly as possible to move the aircraft in line with "strict protocols".

A spokesperson said the protocols had to be followed to "ensure a safe reopening of the runway following a prolonged closure".

Woodgate said it would co-operate fully with the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), which confirmed it was looking into the incident.

An AAIB statement said a multi-disciplinary team of inspectors was deployed to the site.

How were people affected and is there compensation?

With the closure lasting for more than six hours, many passengers suffered significant delays or saw their flights diverted to other airports.

At least 10 flights due to depart from the airport were cancelled, while others were delayed by more than five hours.

Twenty which were due to land at Birmingham were diverted to other airports.

Some passengers told the BBC that their flights were cancelled "moments before boarding" on Wednesday afternoon.

Birmingham Airport said it understood the frustration and apologised for the disruption.

Faye and her family's holiday was cancelled altogether

Faye, who was travelling with her partner and four children, said they found out about the incident on Facebook.

They had been due to fly to Antalya in Turkey with Jet2 at 14:55. While waiting at the airport, the family was given £10 per person by the airline for food and drinks.

She subsequently received a text message saying the holiday had been cancelled and there would be a full refund in four to five days.

She and her family were waiting to collect their baggage, along with about 400 other people, her children "sobbing and crying".

"We are stuck here waiting for our baggage and it's boiling hot... and now our kids aren't going to have a holiday," she said at the time.

Natalie and Gary Wilkinson waited at the airport with their sons for 13 hours

Gary and Natalie Wilkinson faced a 13-hour wait at the airport with their two sons, aged 12 and 14, before they finally boarded a flight to Kefalonia just after 16:00 BST.

The family drove down to Birmingham from Sheffield on Tuesday and checked into a hotel.

They set their alarm for 02:00 BST and when they woke, they saw that everything was back to normal. They got to the airport for 03:00 BST and checked in.

Mr Wilkinson said: "At 5am, we saw a message on the overhead screens that it was two hours until they found us a gate, and from then on it went from bad to worse."

The family were travelling with Tui, he said, but sat in the airport and watched five other Tui flights take off for destinations, including the Canaries and Cyprus, as they waited.

He said a worker at Swissport, which runs airport ground services and cargo handling, told him their plane had been taken for another flight and he understood it was because staff were not available.

Mr Wilkinson claimed Tui had used Wednesday's incident as an excuse to "fob us off", adding: "We have been bypassed and put off."

The BBC has approached Tui for comment.

Advice for passengers is to contact their airline or point of sale regarding compensation as their contract is with their respective airline.

What is the insider view of events?

Former airline captain Emma Henderson said the aircraft in trouble used the emergency "squawk code" – a code that alerts air traffic control to an emergency situation.

"I've seen the footage like everybody else has," she said, "of it coming into land and the right main gear collapses as it comes to a standstill."

The squawk code lets air traffic control staff know they need to move other aircraft away in case the plane facing an emergency suddenly needs to descend, she explained.

Pilots are trained intensively on how to manage such situations and refresh their training in a simulator twice a year, she added.

Dealing with the incident had a "massive impact", former captain Emma Henderson explained

A quick decision would have been made on the plane on Wednesday whether to return to Birmingham, divert elsewhere, or continue on to Belfast.

Ms Henderson said investigations had to take place before the aircraft could be moved from the runway.

The Air Accident Investigation Board would have sent people to look at all aspects of the incident and see the aircraft in place - in the same way an insurance company examines a car crash and looks at where an accident happened, where other vehicles were, and where the car came to rest.

"It's so that they can piece together all the elements that made that thing happen in the first place. They need to find out exactly what went wrong," Ms Henderson said.

She added she had used an emergency squawk code once, following a technical issue on board an aircraft.

"It's still very rare for these things to happen, but obviously on a single runway where you've got to carry out an investigation afterwards, it has a massive impact on all the air traffic that should have been arriving and departing from that airport on that day," she added.