Airline offers refunds

THE mysterious gas leak at Melbourne airport is expected to cost Virgin Blue more than $2 million, after it offered cash refunds and free flights yesterday to furious passengers left stranded this week.Investigators hope to identify by the end of the week the chemical substance that put 47 people in hospital and threw the travel plans of nearly 20,000 Virgin Blue and Regional Express passengers into turmoil.
Thousands of passengers converged on Virgin's south terminal at Melbourne airport early yesterday in a bid to fly out of the city, following delays forced by the terminal's closure on Monday for eight hours when 57 people experienced dizziness, nausea and shortness of breath. Virgin cancelled 82 flights on Monday and a further 20 yesterday as it struggled to cope with massive disruption to its network caused by the closure and its aftermath. Rex cancelled at least 16 services.
About 75 per cent of the airline's flights were back on schedule early last night. The other 25 per cent were running late but airline officials said everyone booked yesterday would get to their destination.
Virgin also announced it was offering a full cash refund or a flight credit coupon for all people who had switched to another airline, as well as a free flight for all passengers delayed for more than four hours.
Angry Virgin officials now want answers about the cause of the biggest daily disruption to services in the airline's history.
Air Services Australia, which co-ordinated the emergency response to the situation, originally suspected a food poisoning outbreak, but it later became clear that the outbreak was the result of an unidentified substance in the air.
Extensive testing by Metropolitan Fire Brigade investigators has failed to establish the nature or location of the substance. But airport spokesman Geoffrey Conaghan said he was confident it could be determined by the end of a two-day debriefing on the incident beginning tomorrow.
Victorian Premier Steve Bracks announced yesterday that Emergency Services Commissioner Bruce Esplin would conduct an inquiry into the incident, in which 47 people were taken to the nearby Northern Hospital for dehydration treatment and blood tests.
"We need to determine how the emergency response system operated," he said