The top management of Aeroflot Airlines will have to make do without the bonuses they had expected to receive for the last quarter of 2010 because of the mess Moscow’s airport found themselves in at the end of December, Prime TASS reports.

‘We were faced with an abnormal weather phenomenon, the so-called ice rain that turned airplanes into icicles: the aircraft bodies were covered in five-centimeter-thick ice sheets in certain places,’ says the carrier’s General Director Vitaly Savelyev.

Savelyev explains they had to spend a month’s stock of chemical reagents in just three days, between December 26 and 29.

‘It took us up to one and a half hours rather than the usual ten minutes to treat the planes with reagents; this was done to ensure safety, Aeroflot’s top priority. Fitting in the timetable and operating smoothly was incredibly difficult under the circumstances,’ he says.

An official investigation is now in progress. Three top managers have been dismissed due to the mistakes that worked havoc at the airports.