Copenhagen Airport: Water leak ends in major delays, more than 50 passengers miss flight
A major airport has had to issue an apology for the chaos.
Huge delays at a major airport have left passengers stranded overseas after they missed their flight.
Long queues at Copenhagen Airport in Denmark on Tuesday left more than 50 passengers of a flight to the UK unable to make it onboard.
A Ryanair flight from Copenhagen to Manchester was supposed to have 179 passengers, but 54 were caught up in the delays and missed the flight.
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While several European airports have been hit with major delays since the electronic entrance system (EES) was launched, that was not the case at the Danish airport.
Instead, it is believed a water leak was to blame for the delays.
The Sun reported that the leak was in a server room connected to the passport control area.
“The longer queues at passport control on Tuesday afternoon were caused by an extraordinary operational issue and were not related to the EES system,” a spokesperson for the airport told the outlet.
“On Tuesday afternoon, an unfortunate water leak occurred in a server room connected to the passport control area in Pier E, one of the airport’s two passport control facilities.
“As a result, all passengers had to pass through passport control in Pier C for the remainder of the day.
“When half of the available passport control capacity is taken out of operation, longer waiting times are unfortunately unavoidable.
“We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this caused our passengers.”
Earlier this year, Australians travelling to Europe for the summer were warned to expect delays because of the new EES.
The system has been plagued with issues since being gradually rolled out from October 2025 and coming into effect on April 10, but an influx of travellers from all over the world for the peak summer season exacerbated the problems and worsened the delays.
The ESS is a digital identity record for non-Europeans travelling in the Schengen area — a group of 29 countries with common border rules — for short stays.
It was meant to streamline and improve border processing by replacing the manual stamping of passports, however, did the opposite at several major airports, including in Lisbon, Portugal.
