Six days after the Filomena storm forced the closure of the Barajas airport, criticism of the Minister of Transport, José Luis Ábalos, grows, for which, the pilots' unions denounce, it has been "a lack of foresight and bad planning "of this crisis.

Sepla, the majority union of pilots,

has demanded Ábalos and Aena, which is the manager of this airport, to explain the device

put into place to combat the effects of the storm on air traffic, and "why it was not enough to maintain the operational level of the airport "at a time when activity was already very low due to the pandemic.

According to the union, many of these failures have also affected the operational safety of the flights that were able to take off.

"The poor condition of the runways caused damage to the fuselage of several planes, which reached their destination with a broken engine," they denounce.

"Barajas airport has reacted again late, slow and badly,

and has once again exposed inexplicable deficiencies for an international reference airport and an important

global connectivity

hub

", said the president of Sepla, Óscar Sanguino, through of a statement.

At the political level, the PP has also criticized that the airport has not recovered normality and "continues to be mired in this chaos" caused by the storm and has denounced Ábalos' "inability to manage".

"Plunged in chaos"

"Barajas has not recovered normality and it is inconceivable and incomprehensible how the airport is plunged into this chaos", criticized, in statements to Europa Press, the spokesman for Transport for the 'popular' in Congress, Andrés Lorite, who

believes that the Ministry should have reinforced its winter plan knowing what was going to happen.

It is not the first time that the snow paralyzes Barajas.

The last snowfall was in 2009 and it affected air traffic significantly, but not so much.

In a country like Spain, little accustomed to such snowfalls, airports activate the winter plan when there is some serious weather forecast.

In these cases, the runways and aircraft parking lots are thoroughly cleaned.

With Filomena, in addition to the intensity of the snowfall, the low temperatures have slowed down all cleaning operations.

Today the Barajas airport

is with 70% of the activity it had the days before the storm,

according to Ábalos himself in statements to La Sexta.

The Madrid airfield already has three operational terminals (T1, T4 and satellite T4) as well as two runways where arrivals and departures are taking place depending on the possibilities.

The airport operated more than 200 flights on Wednesday

, arrival and departure, according to Aena.

The airport manager explains that the strict cleaning tasks on the runways continue "despite the fact that the ice, due to the very low temperatures, complicates it."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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