JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
After seven days of travel chaos in Western Europe, a winter storm is expected to keep dozens more planes on the ground this weekend. The delays could strand thousands more passengers from around the world. The worst hit airport is the one in Amsterdam, where reporter Indy Scholtens spoke to travelers.
INDY SCHOLTENS, BYLINE: Amsterdam's Schiphol airport is still playing catch up after some 300,000 passengers were stranded this week, when snow and freezing weather canceled over 3,000 flights, according to Flightradar. For days now, hundreds have been standing in line, trying to get on a rebooked flight, hoping for a pause in the bad weather. Paul Bryant and his wife left Luxembourg on Tuesday to travel to Seattle.
PAUL BRYANT: The first flight that get canceled was a flight from Findel, which is Luxembourg, to Schiphol. That was the first flight that get canceled. So we took a train. Then we hit the Netherlands' electronic outage on Tuesday. So we had a 4.5 hour train ride, ended up being about 10.5 hours going all over the place.
SCHOLTENS: The cold weather and travel chaos has been hitting much of Western Europe this week. In France and parts of the U.K., tens of thousands of homes lost power. Germany halted train services, and major airports in London, Hamburg and Paris canceled dozens of flights on Friday. Here in Amsterdam, airport and airline officials have struggled to deal with the power outage and a shortage in de-icing product required to spray on plane's wings so they can fly safely. The airport CEO, Pieter van Oord says it's an exceptional situation.
PIETER VAN OORD: (Through interpreter) We haven't experienced anything like this at Schiphol for 10 years because we've never had such a long period of snow. The biggest obstacle is that the airlines have to go back to their old schedules, and that takes days.
SCHOLTENS: Meanwhile, the bad weather is making it hard to even get to the airport, with travel by train and car made difficult as well. Some of those who got stuck, however, are making the best of it. Madeline Smith is a 28-year-old from Kansas City who came back to the airport to take her chances on a new flight home.
MADELINE SMITH: And I knew I could be here for days, so I finally said, let me just get a hotel.
SCHOLTENS: She spent some time exploring Amsterdam instead of waiting.
SMITH: I mean, there's thousands of people, and why not enjoy a city while we're here and make the best of the situation. So...
SCHOLTENS: And that situation isn't expected to improve across much of Western Europe until Monday at the earliest.
For NPR News, I'm Indy Scholtens in Amsterdam. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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