Ok, here's my story of a Sunday afternoon that turned into a wild ride. Luckily the storm cloud had a silver lining though. This is quite long, so hang on.

As a background, I was doing a MR trip HEL-CPH-HAM-VIE-HEL, leaving HEL on SK717 at 12.50 and arriving back on OS347 at 23.20. On the morning of Sunday the 13rd, weather in Helsinki area was pretty good. Temperatures just below zero, but with strong winds from the south that anticipated the coming snow storm.

At around 10.30 as I was lazily preparing to leave for the airport I got an SMS from SAS notifying that my original flight SK649 CPH-HAM was cancelled. Went to checkmytrip to check where I've been rebooked and discovered I was on the next flight at 17.40. As this flight was scheduled to arrive after my Cityline flight to VIE, I tried calling the EB Silver/Gold line for rebooking. Well, apparently they're nowadays closed during the weekend. Ok, try standard SAS reservations. Spent more than 30 minutes listening to elevator music to no avail. I decide to head to the airport and let the ticket office handle it there.

I had looked amadeus.net for some alternative routings, and found options that would be good for me: either get on the 13.20 HEL-MUC and connect to HAM from there and fly KF776 HAM-HEL home, or keep the rebooked outbound flights and skip Vienna in favor of KF776. The agent at Helsinki didn't really agree with me on the MUC routing, reasoning that this would cost them more (?). So HEL-CPH-HAM-HEL it would be. Got my tickets stickered and checked in at the business class counter. At this point all flights were still listed on time.

Go airside, first thing I see is that SK717 is now scheduled for 14.00. This later changed to 14.40. In the meanwhile weather in Helsinki started worsening quickly, with the wind picking up speed and snowfall started. Plane finally arrives at 14.00, we board only to be told that another snowstorm has indeed hit CPH and on the outbound the deicing queues were around 2 hours which caused the delay. Take off a few minutes past 15.00, land around 15.40 after some circling in a holding pattern. At that point it wasn't really snowing and my chances looked good. There were only two planes in deicing.

Shortly after reaching the terminal, snowfall starts again. CPH is in complete chaos, tons of people everywhere, nowhere to sit. Confusion. Most flights showing delays between one and two hours. Several flights cancelled. 17.40 to HAM still showing on-time departure, although the gate keeps changing. At 17.15, scheduled boarding time get a new SMS from SAS about the flight being now scheduled at 18.00, some minutes later this also appears on the monitors. This is getting tight, if KF776 is running on time. But since the queues to the new Transfer center were enormous, I decide to take my changes, reasoning that HEL is probably just as delayed as CPH.

Enter the C2 gate holding pen around 17.40, spend half an hour there. Interestingly the flight showed as closed but the gate agent was still accepting last minuteers. Anyway they finally found us a bus driver and we reached the Dash-8 around 18.15. Queuing for boarding outside in the wind and snow wasn't that funny. Plane totally full. Some time after the captain comes on with the expected bad news. We're ready to go, but currently at number 10 for deicing (around an hour), and after that another queue for runway 04R (45 minutes), the only runway open. The FAs offered juice and water for free, go SAS go! Dozed off and on in the uncomfortable leather seat next to a large Swede, the rumble of the turboprops lulling me to sleep. All of the sudden around 19.15 we start taxiing. The captain comes on, saying that since the temperature has risen to +3 degrees, the snow and ice has melted and we can take off without deicing (sounds really weird though). Take off at 19.30.

Uneventful even though bumpy flight down to HAM, nice views of downtown and St. Paul at landing. Land 45 minutes after take-off. Can't see a KF Avro anywhere, so I reasoned that I'm in for a night at HAM (at my expense, since it was weather-related after all). Well, to my surprise after reaching the terminal the monitors were showing KF776 scheduled for 21.10. I've probably never been more happy about a delayed flight. Go airside, ask from an information counter and the flight is scheduled to land in about 20 minutes.

We board around 21.00, very light load. Then the expected from the captain: "Due to the adverse weather in Helsinki, we now have a scheduled take of slot at 22.10.". Still happy to be on board and homebound, though. We got a somewhat earlier slot, so after deicing (which took ages just like in CPH) take off at 22.00. Eat my first proper airline meal of the day and doze off and on. Finally land at HEL around 01:10. Total chaos, tons of snow, lost-looking people and planes. Had to wait for somebody to dock the gate to us for some time. Run landside and am faced with a taxi queue of at least 200 people, growing all the time. Taxis arriving very slowly. Luckily the buses are running almost on schedule, so finally got home around 02.10, after wading through ankle-deep snow for the last hundreds of meters. Crash immediately.

Conclusion: Everything worked out quite well in the end, but this is not an experience I'd like to repeat in the near future. It was quite stressing, getting information from CPH and SAS was at times impossible (although the SAS SMS alerts worked surprisingly well). Ironically this routing will earn me 80 points more than the original one (which I had booked under the impression that HAM-VIE would be 600 points instead of 300).

No MRs for me for a while. At least in winter time .