Passengers are facing delays after bad weather forced the closure of one of Melbourne Airport’s runways on Thursday.
And the delays are likely to continue on Friday, with the forecast of low cloud, fog and rain in the morning and afternoon.
An Airservices Australia spokeswoman said the airport was operating with just one of its two runways due to poor weather.
“Due to rain and low cloud in Melbourne today they operated on single runway operations all day, which caused extensive delays,”she said.
“The bad news is that tomorrow is looking similar so passengers are advised to check with their airlines for details.”
Qantas, which usually operates about 25 domestic flights an hour, averaged just 18 flights an hour arriving and departing on Thursday.
“We’ve had to delay and cancel some flights throughout today,” a spokeswoman said. “With the cancelled flights we were moving passengers onto the next available flight throughout the day.”
A Melbourne Airport spokeswoman said despite one of the runways being closed it was “operations as usual”.
“It’s all fine, tracking along as normal,” she said. “There’s no runway issues causing any kind of delays.”
The spokeswoman said single runaway operations were “quite common”. “Occasionally we might go to single runway operations, which we were today, but that’s a fairly common occurrence.”
Passengers are advised to check with their airline for details of flight delays.