The airline Air Greenland will not be selling tickets to/from destinations on the west coast of Greenland until the end of July 2022. The background is that flight operations cannot be carried out reliably due to extreme weather conditions.

In the last few days, the weather has repeatedly caused such severe impairments. Especially low clouds and dense fog make Air Greenland difficult to navigate. Since the forecast for the next few days does not seem to bring any improvement, the airline has decided to stop selling airline tickets to the west coast until the end of July 2022. Destinations on the east coast are not affected.

According to their own statements, around 1.000 passengers are stranded all over Greenland. These should have been traveling on domestic flights over the weekend. The aim is to transport the travelers affected to their destinations as quickly as possible and also to work off the backlog of freight that has built up in the meantime.

“Air Greenland is vulnerable at this time. We are not providing the service that we set out to do, so we have to stop selling. This way we can use the remaining capacity if there are delays. The fog and the low clouds bother us so much that the programs planned for today will be postponed, and if that happens several days in a row we will have a big rush of passengers,” says company boss Jacob Nitter Sørensen. “Planes need to be able to get home to base to ensure their maintenance, and when weather forecasts don't allow that, it impacts the flow of the traffic program. The transport challenges in Europe also mean that it is very difficult to find spare capacity for rental on the Atlantic route”.