Air travel "getting back to normal" in Paris

After the previous day's chaos at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, the French capital's major international airport, it's almost "service as usual" on Tuesday.

Snow and ice led Air France to cancel more than 150 flights on Monday leaving more than 3,000 passengers stranded overnight.

Many of them were forced to sleep in the airport terminals as nearby hotels were full.

You can tell it's winter here in France because it's cold - very cold. In fact "unusually cold" with daytime temperatures in the Paris region barely climbing above zero degrees centigrade at the moment.

Another sign that it's winter is that there's snow. Yes, shock horror, the two can sometimes go together even here in France.

And when the snow struck on Monday, the airport at Roissy seemed suitably unprepared.

Now that might come as something of a surprise to anyone who knows the country or has spent any time living here.

After all, the French seem almost as weather-obssessed as the British are reputed to be, and it wouldn't have taken a PhD perhaps for the airlines and the airport authorities to have anticipated what was likely to happen.

Don't believe me? Then flick on the television any evening at eight o'clock on either of the country's two main national channels and you'll be just in time to catch the weather forecast.

But that it seems isn't enough. Once the news is finished, up pops the presenter once again to repeat what he or she told viewers 35 minutes earlier.

Just to push the point a little further both TF1 - the privately owned channel - and France 2, public television - have just "upped the ante" by extending their forecasts from the following three days to five. So in theory we should all be fully informed knowing well ahead of time what's likely to happen.

Of course that also depends on the premise that viewers can have absolute faith in what they're being told.

Indeed on Sunday evening we were all informed that there was a danger of black ice on the roads as the country returned to work after the long holiday break, and there was also the likelihood of snow during the day on Monday.

Not just a light covering of the lovely fluffy, white stuff, but several centimetres falling across a huge chunk of northern France.

More than 20 of the country's 95 metropolitan departments were put on "weather alert" and sure enough the snow, freezing rain and ice arrived - as predicted.

But somehow, somewhere along the line, all that escaped The Powers That Be at Roissy, who failed to take into account what the rest of us knew was coming.

And as Monday's evening news showed, there were plenty of disgruntled passengers barely disguising their disgust at the confusion, lack of information and shortfall of emergency overnight accommodation provided.

Interestingly enough Orly airport, just south of the capital and therefore also subject to exactly the same weather conditions, reported very few cancellations and no accommodation problems for passengers.

There again it is smaller and serves mainly domestic routes, and perhaps its directors had tuned in to the weather forecast the evening before.

The cold snap or French equivalent perhaps of the "Big Chill' is expected to last for the best part of the week.