Zagreb Airport Reopens After Jet Skids Off Runway

Post by : Bandan Preet

Photo: Instagram/@zagrebairport

Zagreb Airport is open again after being closed for almost ten hours. The closure happened because a small private jet skidded off the runway on Sunday afternoon. The plane, a 27-year-old Cessna 525 CitationJet, belongs to a Croatian charter airline called Air Pannonia. It had flown in from Milan Linate Airport and landed at Zagreb at 3:21 PM. But during landing, the jet slid off the runway and stopped on the grassy side area.

Emergency teams from the airport quickly arrived at the scene. Luckily, there were no passengers on the plane, and no one was hurt. But removing the jet took a long time, and because of that, the airport had to stay closed until 12:51 AM on Monday.

Air Pannonia’s founder, Miroslav Vlašić, explained that one of the plane’s tires had burst, which made it impossible to tow the plane away. He also said that Zagreb Airport didn’t have the right equipment to deal with this kind of problem. Even when they asked for help from Civil Protection, they didn’t have the right tools either. Vlašić added that Air Pannonia brought their own private equipment to help and said it was not fair to blame their company for all the flight delays. He believes the issue could have been solved much faster if the airport had better equipment.

Many Sunday flights had to change plans because of this incident. Some flights were sent to different airports. For example, KLM’s flight from Amsterdam and Air Serbia’s flight from Belgrade were sent to Ljubljana. Lufthansa’s flight from Frankfurt and Ryanair’s flight from Rome went to Vienna. A Croatia Airlines flight from Skopje and Ryanair’s flights from Alicante and Weeze were sent to Zadar. About forty outgoing flights were also cancelled. A Croatia Airlines flight from Barcelona had to go to Pula after being delayed for two hours.

Croatia Airlines, the main airline at Zagreb Airport, has not given any public comment about what happened or the status of their flights.

Some flight disruptions are still expected to continue into late Monday morning.

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