Airport forgets Flight! Plane Diverted!
 

A group of 150 Ryanair passengers booked on a flight from Eindhoven to London on January 1st arrived at Eindhoven airport... only to find the airport completely closed for the holiday.
The management of Eindhoven airport had forgotten the only scheduled flight of the day! Since there was nobody at the airport, and all Ryanair offices were also closed for the holiday, passengers ended up calling the police. The police also was unable to contact either staff of Eindhoven airport or Ryanair,
but did discover that air traffic control had diverted the inbound aircraft to Rotterdam. Arriving passengers were being bussed from Rotterdam to Eindhoven. To calm the situation, the police officers ended up arranging busses to take the departing passengers from Eindhoven to Rotterdam, and instructed air traffic control to hold the Ryanair B737 aircraft on the ground at Rotterdam airport, to wait for the busses. So far, nobody of Eindhoven airport management or of Ryanair was available
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Source: Dutch online newspaper Telegraaf

According to our local rag - the Limbabwean - EHEH is closed four days a year of which New Year's day is one , everyone was notified but Ryan seemingly didn't get the message . They also said that an extra flight was arranged to pick up the pax . You get what you pay for !

I always used to say, first thing to check is not the weather, just make sure the field is open for your flight. VIP movements which can close a field without warning are very common in Africa, but this beats the living daylight out of it for me.

Anyway, I suppose at least they time to offload the pax baggage, so it wasn't a totally useless flight.

Dutch joke that I remember.

Whats green and white and travels back in time?

The bus to Limburg

I would presume that the dutch published a NOTAM ref. the closure. One cannot take the opening for an airport for granted, since you could also have an incident or other circumstances tempo closing the airport. If that is true I wonder who missed this NOTAM.

er.. I think that would be the pilots !

How on earth did the inbound flight get off the ground?

A flight plan to a closed airfield must have raised the odd eyebrow at Brussels, surely.