At the beginning of the school holidays, many people from North Rhine-Westphalia started their summer vacation on Saturday.

At the airports, the number of passengers skyrocketed again.

There were sometimes long waiting times at Düsseldorf Airport: The airline Pegasus had canceled five of 17 planned flights to Turkey.

Six more flights to Turkey have been relocated to Frankfurt, Münster and Cologne-Bonn, as an airport spokesman announced on Saturday afternoon. "We regret the situation and the associated inconvenience for our passengers and support with our own staff to inform the passengers about the situation." Officials from the federal and state police are also on site to help. A spokesman for the federal police confirmed the administrative assistance at Düsseldorf Airport.

The day before, the state and federal police had calmed the situation down when there were long waiting times at the airline counters. As reported by WDR, frustrated air travelers kicked Pegasus counters on Friday and threw objects down. The staff then left the workplace in a hurry. There were tumultuous scenes.

According to the airport spokesman, Pegasus canceled four flights to Turkey on Friday evening.

Passengers should be able to take them on Saturday afternoon from Düsseldorf.

The airline itself did not initially comment on the incident.

Otherwise, the start of the summer holidays at Düsseldorf Airport has so far gone smoothly, the airport spokesman said.

Around 120,000 passengers are expected at NRW's largest airport on the first holiday weekend.

Little traffic jams

At first, the traffic on the roads ran relatively smoothly. On Saturday lunchtime, the WDR traffic jam detector showed less than 50 kilometers of traffic jams on the highways in NRW. The first wave of travel on Friday afternoon, with more than 300 kilometers of mostly slow traffic, led to significantly more delays. According to ADAC spokesman Thomas Müther, it was particularly full on the well-known routes such as the A1 around Cologne and the A3 in the direction of the Ruhr area.

In addition to North Rhine-Westphalia, the federal states of Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Hamburg, Brandenburg and Berlin are already on school holidays. Many people drive by car in the direction of the popular vacation spots on the North and Baltic Seas. The corona easing is also favoring travel, as a spokeswoman for the Metelsdorf motorway police said in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. "Since the opening in tourism, the streets are noticeably fuller."

Nevertheless, there would only be a few traffic jams in northern Germany this weekend. "The current traffic volume is normal during the holiday season," said the Bad Oldesloe motorway police in Schleswig-Holstein. The traffic situation is not particularly noticeable. On Saturday afternoon, there were only six kilometers of traffic jams on the A1 north of Lübeck. Traffic was slow between the Hamburg-Ost and Hamburg-Billstedt junction. On the A7 in the direction of Flensburg there was a temporary traffic jam of one kilometer.