At least 140 flights to and from Frankfurt Airport have been cancelled on Thursday after climate protestors broke onto the runway and glued themselves to the tarmac in the latest such stunt to affect Germany’s airline industry.
The protestors, who have been identified as belonging to The Last Generation group, managed to gain access to Frankfurt Airport’s airfield in the early hours of Thursday morning where they unfurled banners calling for an end to the use of oil and gas.
Police quickly surrounded the protestors but it took several hours for the activists to be removed. During that time, Frankfurt Airport was forced to suspend all flight movements due to safety concerns.
In a statement, Frankfurt Airport said flights had now resumed but warned passengers that disruptions should be expected for the rest of the day.
“This morning, climate activists gained illegal access to Frankfurt Airport,” a spokesperson for the airport explained. “For safety reasons, flight operations had to be temporarily suspended for the entire airport as a result of the incident.”
Flights were allowed to resume at 7:50 am but by that point, 140 flights had already been cancelled and 50 flights due to arrive during the morning rush were forced to divert to other airports across Europe.
The protest comes just a day after another group of climate activists managed to break onto the runway at Cologne-Bonn Airport on Wednesday during what they described as a coordinated Europe-wide wave of action against the airline industry.
London’s Metropolitan Police said they intercepted and arrested a group of protestors who they believed were trying to break onto the airfield at Heathrow Airport.
Nine activists from the Just Stop Oil group were taken into custody as part of a police operation that the Met said had “prevented significant disruption to the airport and travelling public.”
Heathrow Airport had been anticipating some form of protest action and had recently secured a High Court injunction which bans activists from trespassing anywhere at the busy West London airport for at least the next five years.
The latest wave of protest action was organised by a group identifying themselves as ‘Oil Kills’. In a statement, a spokesperson for the group said: “Ordinary people are taking matters into their own hands today to do what our criminal governments have failed to do.”
“We are putting our bodies on the wheels of the machine of the global fossil economy and saying oil kills; we refuse to die for fossil fuels and we refuse to stand by while hundreds of millions of innocent people are murdered.”
The group is demanding that governments commit to stopping the use of oil and gas by 2030 at the latest.
Nancy Faeser, Germany’s Minister of the Interior and Home Affairs, slammed the actions of the protestors, saying what they had done was “dangerous, stupid and criminal.”
“Those who block runways not only risk their own lives, but also endanger others and harm all travelers. These acts must be punished more severely. We have proposed severe prison sentences.”
