Heathrow will always struggle with snow airport admits One pilot described the situation at Heathrow on Saturday night as "carnage." The decision was backed by David Cameron's spokesman. "BAA and Heathrow had to make some judgments on the basis of the best information at the time, and they decided to cancel some flights," he said. "I don't know why the rate of cancellations was higher than that agreed between the airlines, air traffic control and the airport," said Mike Carrivick, chief executive of the Board of Airline Representatives in the UK. "Although it was better than December 2010, clearly there are still lessons to be learned," he added. Kwasi Kwarteng, Tory MP for Spelthorne which borders Heathrow and a member of the Transport Select Committee voiced his misgivings at the events of the weekend. We went through this last year and it isn't as if snow is something new in Britain. They did buy a lot of snow clearing equipment and people would have expected them to do a lot better. In some cases co-ordination between the Heathrow's snow clearance teams needed to make stands usable and the airline's own plane de-icing squads was poor. On at least one flight. a Saturday evening service to Mumbai, hundreds of passengers were left stranded on an aircraft for five hours. After the flight was cancelled passengers were told by crew they would have to remain on the plane because there were insufficient UK Border Agency staff available at that time of night to readmit them into the country. A Home Office spokesman denied that it had ordered the passengers to remain on the plane.