Australian travellers can expect further delays as snow and freezing temperatures continue to wreak havoc on European airports and freight routes.
Qantas managed to get three aircraft out of London's Heathrow Airport overnight, as well as seven flights out of Asia.
Four London-bound flights have also managed to leave Australia, clearing the airline's backlog from the weekend.
British Airways said one flight, BA10, was expected to leave Sydney today and fly to London via Bangkok.
Two flights also managed to make it out of Heathrow on Monday night, a spokeswoman said. They will arrive in Sydney tomorrow morning.
But the announcement that Heathrow's second runway will be closed again on Tuesday has meant the prevailing mood is uncertain.
"We are planning to operate as many flights as possible, but we have had to make significant cancellations, especially to our short-haul program," a British Airways spokeswoman said.
"We would urge customers not to travel to the airport unless they have a confirmed booking on one of the flights that is operating."
Meanwhile, travellers are reeling from nightmare journeys.
Sydney man Michael said he flew Air China from Sydney to London, via Beijing, on Saturday but was diverted to Brussels about 2pm.
"Our plane sat on the tarmac there from 5pm until 11pm with almost no information given out except to say that [Heathrow] was still closed and Air China had no staff on the ground to help us," he said via email.
"We were finally allowed to get off the plane when there was a near riot by passengers - lots of shouting and it looked like it would turn ugly.
"I then had to sleep on the floor of the terminal tile floor with my two boys (11 and 13, one with a broken toe in plaster).
"Food vouchers [were] given but [two-] hour line for a single squalid canteen."
The Belgian Red Cross came to the travellers' aid with water and camp beds.
"After being told we faced another night or two waiting for flight to continue to [Heathrow] we took airport staff advice and took Eurostar to London instead."
But Michael's family found all trains out of Kings Cross were also cancelled that evening.
"We are now trying to locate our baggage," he said.
The dramas capped a weekend of snowstorms that forced thousands to camp out in terminals across Europe.
1000 German flights cancelled
More than 1000 flights at German airports in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin were cancelled, disrupting business and Christmas holiday plans.
Freezing temperatures were expected to continue in Britain and Scandinavia for much of this week. Most of the rest of Europe is forecast to warm up in coming days, although a drop back to sub-zero levels is likely next week. For some the snowfall was welcome. Children's sledges were sold out in Germany.
"This much snow is only fun if you're a kid," said Berlin lawyer Katja-Julia Fischer, 42: "It's getting on my nerves."
The severe weather has hit retailers at the height of Christmas trading. Britain's biggest department store chain, John Lewis, said sales fell more than 10 percent on Saturday.
Some online retailers were declining new orders or cancelling existing ones because of delivery problems, according to the industry body IMRG.
Northern France was also covered by heavy snow, disrupting road and rail traffic as Parisians braved clogged highways to reach their holiday destinations.
Army Vehicles
France's army deployed blue armoured personnel carriers on highways around Paris, where they used their horsepower to drag stranded cars out of ditches and back onto the road.
In Paris, children made snowmen on the whitened lawns in front of the Eiffel Tower. Snowboarders even took to the hills of northern Paris, an unusual sight in a city known for its rainy, temperate weather.
The unusually severe winter weather buoyed demand for energy and helped share prices in London. Oil majors were higher as temperatures in Europe and the U.S. Northeast looked set to remain below zero this week, boosting fuel demand.
"If this winter wonderland continues, it's not only good news for Santa, but an early Christmas present for the utility companies too," said Jimmy Yates, head of equities at CMC Markets.
But airline shares suffered from the disruption at one of their busiest times of the year. British Airways shares fell 1.5 per cent and Germany's Lufthansa fell 0.8 per cent.
BA, which is losing up to £10 million ($15.5 million) a day according to analysts, said Arctic conditions would continue to cause major disruption to its operations. Only one runway would be in use at Heathrow, its hub, on Tuesday.
"We don't have a flight"
Brandi Gonzalez, a 27-year-old pre-school teacher from Connecticut, was stuck at Heathrow after waiting since Friday to fly to New York with her husband and son.
"All I'm getting is 'We will help you as much as we can'. It's a two-hour wait on the phone to rebook a flight. Today I sat on the phone for two hours to get hung up on. They said 'We still don't have another flight', and I got hung up on."
The German carrier Lufthansa said it was confident it would operate a full service by Wednesday.
Air France said there were serious delays to passenger flights and cargo operations at the two main Paris airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, after a snowstorm on Monday.
The weather forced Eurostar to impose speed limits on its cross-Channel trains between Britain and France, adding up to two hours to journey times.
Passengers formed a slow-moving line that stretched for hundreds of metres around the block outside London's St Pancras station.
With temperatures hovering around zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit), and likely to fall well below freezing, charity workers handed out cups of tea to passengers wrapped up in scarves, gloves and woolly hats.
Germany's most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia, took the unusual step of banning trucks from motorways in a bid to keep passenger traffic rolling. A rail worker was killed in Berlin, run over by a train while trying to de-ice a switch. Belgium also closed its motorways to trucks after tailbacks totalled 600 km in the morning rush hour.
In Poland, six people froze to death on Sunday night, raising the death toll to 114 in the last month.
Heavy snow snarled Warsaw traffic again on Monday. Warsaw airport was open but receiving far fewer passengers than usual because of flight cancellations in western Europe.
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