mr president i rise to make a statement about the plight of hundreds of thousands of airline passengers in europe in the ten days before christmas and the chaos in the arrangements for transporting them and their baggage to their intended destinations
the failure of our airlines and our airports to deal with a few centimetres of snow in a few member states caused devastating delay disruption and despair for travellers
i call on parliament's committee on transport and tourism the union's transport commissioner and transport ministers in the council to conduct an inquiry into the disruption to make provisions to prevent its recurrence to ensure that those affected are properly compensated and to study a sharing of the burden of compensation in future between the airline companies and others involved such as airport operators
unusual snowfalls and uncommonly low temperatures as predicted in two thousand and nine by the potsdam institute arise from the melting of the arctic ice cap
they will become more frequent
we cannot prevent them however much we must try to limit them but we can and we must be prepared for them
