Hundreds of flights cancelled amid strikes at 11 German airports
Hundreds of flights have been cancelled in Germany on Thursday amid a one-day strike by aviation security workers at 11 airports across the country.
The strike forced the closure of security checkpoints at all 11 affected airports, meaning no travellers could enter the airport and board flights.
But the impact of the strike on flight operations, which began in the early hours of Thursday at most of the airports, varied widely.
The airports hit by the strike are Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, Leipzig, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hanover, Stuttgart, Erfurt and Dresden.
At Germany's busiest airport hub in Frankfurt, for instance, about 310 flights had been cancelled as of Thursday morning out of a schedule of 1,120 flights.
Lufthansa, which is based in Frankfurt, announced plans to continue flying a nearly full schedule for arriving and connecting passengers, although no travellers could begin their journey in Frankfurt due to the security strike.
In Berlin, all departures and many arrivals were cancelled and the terminal on Thursday morning appeared deserted. In Dusseldorf, around a third of take-offs and landings were cancelled, and in nearby Cologne - where the strikes began late on Wednesday evening - virtually all air traffic had ceased.
Other airports, such as Lufthansa's secondary hub in Munich, are not impacted by the strike and were operating on largely normal flight schedules.
