600 passengers sleep on grounded planes at Munich Airport

600 passengers spent a winter night on stationary aircraft at Munich Airport after heavy snowfall, runway closures and de-icing queues pushed six departures past the airport’s 1 a.m. curfew. With gates occupied by cancellations, the planes could not return to the terminal, and airport officials said bus transfers were severely restricted by the late hour and “communication problems”, according to Business Insider. Police in Upper Bavaria are preparing a report for prosecutors, though officers said no complaints had yet been filed.

The episode is a case study in how tightly-coupled airport operations fail when several “small” constraints line up. Snow does not merely slow departures; it also consumes scarce ground capacity. De-icing becomes a shared bottleneck, and when runways are periodically closed to clear accumulation, departure slots evaporate in bursts rather than gradually. Curfew rules then turn delay into a hard stop: once the clock runs out, aircraft that are otherwise serviceable must stay put.

What followed was a parking-and-people problem. When dozens of flights are cancelled, aircraft that would normally be at gates are instead staged on stands or left at the terminal, filling the same finite footprint needed for irregular operations. Munich Airport said there was “no space left to park at the terminal” for the six aircraft. Moving passengers off the aircraft requires staffed buses, drivers within duty hours, access control at the terminal, and coordination between airport operations and multiple airlines. When any of those links is missing—especially after midnight when staffing is thinnest—the default becomes containment: keep passengers on board because the alternative cannot be executed safely or legally.

Airlines and airports have spent decades optimising turnaround for normal conditions: minimal buffers, high gate utilisation, and ground-handling schedules tuned to predictable peaks. That efficiency is paid for with fragility. A snow day is not just “bad weather”; it is a stress test of every dependency that sits outside the aircraft itself, from de-icing trucks and stand allocation to curfew exemptions and ground-transport availability.

Munich Airport said it “apologized expressly” to affected passengers. Six flights still spent the night parked, because the terminal was full and the buses were not.