Belt Breakdown at Moscow Airport Leaves Travelers Stuck on Tarmac

A baggage belt malfunction at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport on Sunday morning threw travel plans into chaos, delaying 34 flights and canceling three more. The breakdown, which hit around 10:30 a.m., forced ground crews to manually sort and load luggage, leaving some passengers stranded inside their aircraft for hours. Among the hardest hit were travelers on an Utair flight to Antalya, who boarded as scheduled but then sat on the plane for three hours as workers struggled to handle bags by hand.

According to reports from the Telegram channel Baza, the delays rippled across both arrivals and departures: 26 inbound flights were held up, with two scrapped entirely, while eight outbound flights faced delays and one was canceled. The manual sorting created a bottleneck, and some passengers missed connecting flights because of the holdup. At the airport, oversized baggage belts were pressed into service to handle the overflow of luggage that could not be processed normally.

The trouble followed another rough day at Vnukovo: on Saturday, a separate wave of delays hit Turkish Airlines travelers, with some waiting more than 12 hours to depart. For holidaymakers and business travelers alike, the weekend’s disruptions turned routine travel into a test of patience, highlighting the fragility of airport infrastructure when key equipment fails.