Thunderstorms and lightning: is compensation paid when your flight is cancelled?

An airline need not pay compensation if it proves the disruption was caused by extraordinary circumstances that could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken (Article 5(3)). Recital 14 cites weather conditions incompatible with operating the flight, and under recital 15 the same should apply where an air traffic management decision about a particular aircraft on a particular day causes a long delay or a cancellation.

The Court of Justice has ruled on lightning hitting the aircraft itself. In Case C‑399/24, the aircraft due to fly Iași–Vienna was struck shortly before landing in Iași during a thunderstorm; after mandatory safety inspections the flight reached Vienna more than seven hours late. On 16 October 2025 the Court held that such a strike, leading to mandatory inspections and a late return to service, is an extraordinary circumstance.

On Wednesday 7 October 2026, the news site Metrópoli Abierta reported that a thunderstorm over the preceding hours had forced Barcelona's El Prat airport to suspend operations for at least an hour. According to Aena, quoted by the paper, the cause was voltage problems in certain control tower equipment: lightning ended up affecting part of the systems used to manage air traffic.

Aena also said almost all the disruption was linked to the storm, which hampered take-offs and landings, caused delays and diversions and led to around 30 cancellations. It followed an already difficult Tuesday with at least 47 cancellations and more than 500 delays by the evening, according to figures circulated during the day.

Both the storm and the outage are events of the kind recitals 14 and 15 describe. But under the Commission's guidelines weather events call for a case-by-case assessment, so that settles no individual flight – and care, re-routing and refunds applied whatever the cause.

The weather must have caused your particular disruption: the airline has to show both the circumstance and its link to your flight. If a later flight is cancelled for reasons other than the storm, it is assessed on that reason.

Knock-on delays count only with a direct causal link: an airline may rely on an extraordinary circumstance that hit an earlier flight it operated with the same aircraft only if it directly caused your flight's long delay or cancellation (C‑74/19, 11 June 2020).

The airline must also have taken all reasonable measures. In a case about a power failure that closed the Malmö-region airspace in 2006, knocking out radar and navigation systems, the Court held in 2011 that airlines must reasonably allow for such risks when planning a flight and build in a certain reserve time, without intolerable sacrifices (C‑294/10 Eglītis). Nor is re-routing you on the airline's own next-day flight a reasonable measure if another direct or indirect flight, with the same or another airline, would have arrived less late – unless that would have been an intolerable sacrifice (C‑74/19).