London's Heathrow Airport was returning to normal Monday after half its regular flights were cancelled because of a heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures across Europe.
The airport, Europe's busiest, normally has about 1,300 flights a day serving 180,000 people, but the schedule was cut Sunday after up to 16 centimetres of snow fell across much of Britain.
"Heathrow is open and our usual flight schedule is operating today," the airport said in a statement. "There will, however, be a handful of cancellations as result of yesterday's disruption. We advise passengers to contact their airlines to check before they come to the airport."
The extreme cold and snowfall caused havoc in Europe. In Poland, the government said nine people had died of hypothermia the previous 24 hours in the cold snap.
Thousands of Europeans continued to dig out from heavy snow that has fallen during a week of bitter cold. Hundreds of people, the majority of them homeless, have died, media reports said, as temperatures dropped as low as –36 C in Ukraine, the hardest-hit country.
The deaths in Poland raised the total number there to 62. Pawel Fratczak, a spokesman for firefighters, told The Associated Press that 15 people were killed over the weekend in fires started by heaters.
Bosnia used helicopters on Sunday to evacuate the sick and deliver food to thousands of people left stranded by its heaviest-ever recorded snowfall.
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