29 seconds late: Aviation authority in Münster denies BVB´s plane landing permission
What other Bundesliga teams currently are not capable of doing, the airport in Nuremberg and the aviation authority in Münster have accomplished: they stopped the league leaders and forced them to drive on icy roads home. Just because they were 29 seconds late (!), the Dortmund airport had to refuse the turboprop plane with the Borussia Dortmund team on board the permission to land and diverted it to Paderborn.
"We deeply regret this incident," said Markus Bunk, the head of the airport, on Monday. "But it wasn´t our fault. We tried to give BVB the permission to land. An exemption request was made to extent the landing permission for the flight OLT 8704 from Nuremberg to Dortmund from 11:00 pm to 11:01 pm, but it was refused by the employee in charge at the aviation authority in Münster! "Our hands were tied," said Bunk.
"It´s a first-class provincial farce," said an angry sports director Michael Zorc on Sunday night. "They send us to Paderborn because we were 29 seconds late. It´s absolutely ridiculous." So instead of 9:50 pm, the BVB camp only arrived at 0:30 am in Dortmund.
Despite the wintery conditions, the team had done everything possible to be on time at the airport. Only 40 minutes after the final whistle of their 2-0 victory in Nuremberg, the players boarded the bus to the airport where they arrived at 8:28 pm. And only another 15 minutes later, at 8:43, the seatbelts were fastened.
But the airport Nuremberg then needed until 10 pm to defrost the plane of the regional airline OLT. The OLT headquarters in Emden used every power of persuasion and asked the Nuremberg airport to defrost the BVB plane first as "we fly to an airport that closes at 2300," a spokesperson from OLT explained.
It sounds like a joke - and it turned into a joke as soon as the plane took off at 10:14 pm. At 10:58 pm the aircraft passed the train station in Unna, slowly but gradually descending to Dortmund airport. But then pilot André Meier was told to go around and abort the landing as, at the behest of Münster, the BVB carrier was refused landing. If Meier would have still touched down the plane in Dortmund, he would have lost his pilot´s licence.
"We are representatives of the city - and then something like this happens. A joke," said an angry skipper Roman Weidenfeller. "When on approach, you should let it land." Instead, with the engines roaring, the aircraft started to climb again and flew to Paderborn. By the way, the noise pollution for the residents was greater than it would have been if the plane had actually landed...
"There is black ice on the roads and they send us to the Autobahn," said a furious Jürgen Klopp after the landing in Paderborn about the man in charge in Münster who with his decision has surely made sure that the team will not "fly too high" after winning the Herbstmeisterschaft...