Airport chief Arnaud Feist said the night before that the airport should reopen with three Brussels Airlines flights departing for European destinations. Starting Monday, the number of flights is expected to increase to five or six per hour.
“It will also depend on the speed at which airlines can organize to go from Brussels Airport," Feist was quoted as saying by local media. “That we may resume our activities barely 12 days after the horrific attacks is a sign that we are especially united at Brussels airport,” he said.
Brussels Airlines will be operating Sunday’s first three “symbolic” flights in the early afternoon, departing for Athens, Turin in Italy and the Portuguese city of Faro. Sixteen flights are expected to operate on Monday, some of them intercontinental, including to New York and some arriving from African destinations.
By later in the week, the airport is expected to be able to handle 800 passengers per hour.
Police and airport authorities said passengers must arrive with printed proof of flights in order to get to the airport building, and that they must come only by taxi or car.
Vehicles will be subject to being pulled over and searched by police, and the airport has been newly equipped with cameras that read license plates, local media reports said.
Inside the airport, passengers will undergo a “pre-check” -- that will include a baggage and hand-luggage search -- before being allowed into a temporary departure hall.
Before the attacks that killed some 32 people at the airport and came shortly before another bombing at a nearby Metro station, Brussels was a major European hub for airlines around the world.
"We plan to increase the number of flights every day," Geert Sciot, the Brussels Airlines spokesman, told reporters, explaining that flights have been operating from regional airports during the closure in Brussels.
Brussels went into lockdown after the airport and metro bombings -- which were claimed by the Islamic State (ISIS) group -- as police cracked down with raids and arrests on jihadi suspects.
Investigators have linked the suicide bombings in Brussels to a November 13 attack in Paris that killed 130 people.
The attacks killed 32 people and wounded several hundred.
In Brussels’ Molenbeek district, where the Metro bombing took place and where police have focused their raids, protesters on Saturday tried to stage an anti-Islamic demonstration despite a ban by authorities, clashing with police. Some 40 demonstrators were arrested, according to local media reports.
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via Defense News