BUSINESS at Exeter International Airport returned to normal yesterday after 24 hours without a commercial flight.

Sixteen outbound flights to destinations including the Channel Islands, Scotland, Newcastle and Manchester — and a similar number of inbound flights — were disrupted on Monday, affecting nearly 600 passengers.

As reported in the Echo yesterday, the airport has three fire engines to deal with aircraft fires. Two operational engines are needed to meet Civil Aviation Authority standards. The third is a spare. In what the airport claimed were "unprecedented circumstances", one fire engine had a technical issue over the weekend, and a second developed a fault on Monday morning, before the first was fixed. All flights after 7am were cancelled. Airport spokesman Stephen Ayres said flights were able to resume yesterday after another specialist fire vehicle was obtained from elsewhere.

He said: "It arrived and was deemed ready to be operational at about midnight and there was absolute normality after that."

Mr Ayres said although there were no extra flights, there was enough availability on the aircraft to ensure that people who had expected to travel on Monday were able to fly yesterday if they wished.

He said the airport has the use of the additional fire vehicle for as long as it takes for its own trucks to be sorted out.

He said: "Talks with engineers about our own fire engines are still an outstanding issue."

A full investigation into the technical issues surrounding the failure of the fire vehicles will be carried out.

Mr Ayres was unable to give an estimate of the cost of the disruption, which saw some passengers, who booked their holidays with Thomson and First Choice, put on coaches to airports in Bristol and Birmingham to continue journeys to Madeira, Turkey and France.

He said: "We would like to emphasise that we wish to express our sincere apologies to those affected."

Mr Ayres said staff did all they could to assist stranded passengers, from providing water to helping a man charter a private flight to Ireland.

A Flybe spokesman said 1,831 passengers were due to fly in or out of Exeter on scheduled flights. Around 760 passengers were able to complete their journey. He said: "Clearly there will be costs associated with such a fundamental level of disruption but we have not yet calculated the level of financial impact."