Climate protester lies atop plane
LONDON - A protester lay on top of a plane while another forced a jet to turn around on the runway as climate change activists descended on London City Airport on Thursday, causing some flight disruption as the number of arrests this week topped 1000.
Protest organisers Extinction Rebellion had vowed to occupy the airport’s terminal and shut down operations for three days as part of its action in the British capital. The airport said two flights were cancelled but it had run an almost complete schedule of flights.
London City is the capital’s fifth-biggest — and most central — airport, popular with business travellers, bankers and politicians for short-haul and regional routes.
A Reuters photographer saw one man, former paralympian cyclist James Brown, lay himself across the top of the body of a British Airways Embraer 190 jet.
“I managed to get on the roof,” Mr Brown said in a video he posted online. “This is all about the climate and ecological crisis. We’re protesting against government inaction.”
He was eventually removed. The flight to Amsterdam had to be cancelled and a spokeswoman for BA said “we are investigating what happened as a matter of urgency”.
The group said they were protesting plans to expand the airport, which aims to have 6.5 million passengers a year by 2022 compared to 4.8 million in 2018, and which has said there could be demand for as many as 11 million by 2035.