Düsseldorf/Köln (dpa/lnw) - Breathe a sigh of relief at the large North Rhine-Westphalian airports: After weeks of annoyance about extremely long queues, air traffic started relaxed on Sunday. Cologne/Bonn Airport, which had put off tens of thousands of passengers over the past few weeks with particularly long queues and numerous flight cancellations, reported on Twitter on Sunday morning: "There is currently (8:30 a.m.) no waiting time before the security check." However, this could change "depending on the number of open control lanes" over the course of the day.
Even at the largest NRW airport in Düsseldorf, only short waiting times of up to ten minutes were reported on the website on Sunday morning. Initially, no cancellations appeared in the departure lists of both airports.
Düsseldorf Airport was expecting a total of almost 130,000 passengers this weekend. In Cologne/Bonn, around 110,000 passengers were expected from Friday to Sunday - about as many as on the previous weekends.
According to the airports, the Verdi observer and other dpa information, air traffic in NRW was already largely normal on Saturday. Düsseldorf Airport had only reported longer waiting times at baggage claim in the afternoon.
It is the first summer holiday weekend when all federal states, together with Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, have now closed their schools and it is the penultimate one in the most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The ADAC had forecast one of the worst traffic jam weekends of the season for the nationwide motorways.
The chaos feared by some because of the flow of arrivals and departures did not materialize in NRW, at least until Sunday morning. Here the traffic at the airports as well as on the motorways and railway lines was similar to other weekends.
