Off the Crossbar: Bayern Munich’s flight from Paris was delayed due to a technical accident

Bayern Munich’s Champions League trip to Paris may have ended in success, but they had a slight blip to deal with on the way home.

The morning after the 1-0 win over Paris Saint-Germain, the team was at the airport to board the plane for Munich. All was going well, until things took a rather unexpected turn. Bayern’s charter flight, LH2571, was considerably delayed, around 75 minutes according to Bild. Even after the initial delay, the boarding process was also pushed back because of a temporary unavailability by the airport shuttle bus.

The delay was apparently caused by a construction accident by Deutsche Bahn, where an excavator mistakenly severed a bunch of optic cables from Deutsche Telekom while working on a railway line in Frankfurt. As a result, all communications at Lufthansa were shut down, and countless domestic flights, as well as multiple international ones, were subsequently delayed or canceled. Perhaps naturally, due to the proximity of the accident, Frankfurt Airport was most affected by the accident.

A lot of domestic passengers were asked to switch to the train for their travels. Ironic, considering it was Germany’s national rail that got the passengers into this mess in the first place. The problem is being fixed at the time of writing.

Thankfully, traffic in and out of Munich Airport was less affected, and the Bayern charter flight was able to take off at 12:32 pm local time, safely landing in the Bavarian capital roughly an hour later. Had the team been forced to take the train as well, it would have been a grueling journey of well over five hours from Paris to Munich, with a potential transfer in between.

This isn’t the first time Bayern had flight problems. Two years ago, Bayern’s flight to the Club World Cup in Qatar was also severely delayed first by bad weather, and then by Berlin Brandenburg Airport’s curfew hours. As a result, the team had to spend the night on the plane before flying to Doha, landing just a day before their first game. Thankfully, it was just a minor hiccup as Bayern went on to win the tournament and complete a historic sextuple.

If that little mishap is anything to go by, it’s that delayed flights can end in triumph. Perhaps this Lufthansa delay will mean that Bayern will go on to win their seventh Champions League…?