7 Most Extreme Flight Diversions From Storm Isha

23.01.2024 - 08:06 / skift.com / Gordon Smith

A surprise trip to Paris is usually the stuff of romance novels. However, for more than a thousand air passengers on Sunday, a very unexpected trip to the City of Love read more like a horror story.

Storm Isha battered northern Europe over the weekend, bringing gusts of wind up to 99mph, and causing serious headaches for airlines and airports. Alongside more than 100 flight cancellations, the treacherous conditions forced many pilots to make huge diversions to their regular routes. 

Data provided to Skift by Flightradar24 shows how dozens of routine journeys were upended, with some passengers landing in a completely different country more than 1,000 miles from their expected destination.

Landing at an alternative location when the original destination airport is unavailable is standard procedure. In fact, before every flight takes off, pilots must review and assign a range of official diversionary airfields should things go awry en route. 

However, the sheer size of Storm Isha and its focus on densely populated areas in the U.K. and Ireland meant that flight crews had to fly much further than usual to land safely.

During the storm’s peak, many routine flights spiraled in length. Using the latest data from Flightradar24, here are seven of the most extreme Storm Isha diversions, including several unscheduled visits to Paris…

On a normal day, the short hop across the Irish Sea should take just over half an hour. However, Sunday was anything but regular for those onboard Ryanair Flight FR555. After circling at low altitude for 45 minutes and an attempt at landing in Dublin, the Boeing 737 was rerouted to Beauvais Airport, 55 miles north of Paris. The plane and its passengers landed safely in France three hours after leaving Manchester, with onward transport eventually being provided.

Departing Ireland’s West Coast just before midday on Sunday, passengers were expecting a journey time of just under an hour for the trip to the Scottish capital. Storm Isha had other ideas. With the weather conditions deteriorating across the U.K. and Ireland, Flight FR3598 was forced to divert to Cologne after making circuits over Edinburgh. Travelers landed in the German city at 4 pm local time.

An additional complication came for the poor passengers onboard easyJet Flight EZY319. The service linking Edinburgh and Bristol in southwest England fell victim to the storm, with a major detour required. Due to the lack of available diversion airports in the U.K., the Airbus plane was forced to divert internationally to Paris. Some customers reported on social media that as they hadn’t brought their passports for the domestic trip, they were not allowed to leave the airport in France and had to sleep overnight on the terminal