How Twitter becomes the essential crisis-management tool when European airports are in chaos

It is starting to become the norm: volcanoes, air traffic controllers strikes and, like every winter, snow, snow and more snow...

And Twitter is steadily becoming the number one resource for stranded passengers, airlines, infrastructure managers, transport authorities and onlookers to assess the situation and communicate with each other. At this point in time no one beats Twitter and its capacity to engage in real time with multiple players. Want further proof? Look at this snapshot from

KLM's Facebook page, taken amidst the snow-related air traffic disruption of this weekend:

Another issue up for discussion is why UK airports are so sensitive to adverse weather conditions, it would be foolish to expect the same level of readiness in the face of snow than, for example, Finland, but the UK is not located precisely in the tropics, and we know there are snow storms every winter, given the large flux of people transiting through UK airports, even if problems last for just a few days, the amount of disruption is huge! wondering whether are there are better ways to cope with snow...

Does it need to be like this every winter?