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Demonstration at Schipol Airport
Photo: Piroschka Van de Wouw / REUTERS
Environmental activists broke into Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Saturday and are trying to prevent private jets from taking off.
According to reports from the Reuters news agency and the daily newspaper AD, there were at times several hundred people on the site, some on bicycles.
Apparently, a gate was opened in a parking lot through which the demonstrators slipped, it said.
The action was organized by the groups Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion.
According to Greenpeace, several people were chained to private jets.
Others stage sit-ins under plane wings and fuselages.
A military plane was also blocked, as seen on social media.
Private jets are considered to be one of the most climate-damaging means of transport.
According to a report by Deutschlandfunk, in extreme cases the per capita CO2 emissions are 80 times higher than with a scheduled flight.
The research agency CE Delft evaluated flight movements of private jets from Schiphol and Rotterdam The Hague Airport on behalf of Greenpeace.
In the first nine months of this year, more private flights took off than in all of 2019, it said.
2019 was the last year before the corona pandemic with regular flights.
According to flight data, the flight route was shorter than 500 kilometers for more than a third of these flights.
Almost eleven percent of the routes were even shorter than 250 kilometers.
CE Delft puts the average per capita CO2 emissions of private jets at five to six times that of a scheduled flight.
According to the police, the demonstration at Schipol Airport has so far been peaceful.
The activists would now be carried away.
Six demonstrators were arrested.
The airport management itself did not comment on the demonstration.
At noon there was also a protest march to the construction site of a new terminal.
ssu/Reuters
