A Swiss airliner overshot a German airport runway while landing Thursday as fresh snow led to closures of several main German highways and hundreds of road accidents, according to Deutsche Presse Agentur (dpa). While no one was hurt by the emergency at Stuttgart Airport, air traffic in the southwestern German region was disrupted for several hours. An airport spokesman said the plane had ended up on frozen soil, 50 metres beyond the end of the runway. The 40 passengers and three crew were able to leave the plane unharmed. Why the 49-seat Embraer 145 plane operated by airline Swiss was unable to stop in time was not known. Snow was lightly falling at the time and the local temperature was minus 3 degrees Celsius. The plane had been on a flight from Zurich. A Swiss spokesman said there was no visible damage to the plane. Because of salvage work, the single-runway airport had to be closed for about two and a half hours, leading to 25 flight cancellations, several diversions and 47 delays to landings and take-offs. At Frankfurt International Airport, one of three runways had to be closed for part of Thursday by snow, causing cancellations mainly to domestic and intra-European flights. In Germany's Lower Saxony state, six articulated trucks skidded on new snow and crashed on the A1 highway within just 10 minutes Thursday morning, police said. A 41-year-old truck driver was killed when he failed to notice one of the pile-ups and careered into it. Elsewhere in northern Germany, the A30, A1 and A24 highways were closed for part of Thursday after mass pile-ups or trucks jack- knifing on the autobahn carriageway. --SP 23 33 Local Time 20 33 GMT
