Active Aging Minister Jo Etienne Abela was temporarily suspended... in a cable car 2,500 metres above sea level in the French Pyrenees, as a blizzard raged on around him.

The incident happened on Thursday when Abela was on holiday in the French mountains with a group of Gozitan friends.

They were riding a cable car up a mountain called Pic du Midi, when the cable car suddenly jolted and stopped as if it got stuck.

And it stayed there, suspended, at an altitude of around 2,500 metres, for an hour.

Contacted for comment on Friday, Abela said it was a very minor incident and the group is laughing about it now, but it wasn't such a laughing matter then.

"We all joked around for the first five or 10 minutes when the cable car got stuck," he said.

"But when we realised we were going to be stuck and locked inside that cabin for longer, we began to feel uneasy. A massive blizzard was raging on around the cable car and we could look down and see that we were suspended from a huge height. Then it wasn't funny anymore."

After about an hour, the cable car jolted again, moved and made it safely to the next station, where the group could get off, sigh in relief and joke about the incident again.

Abela said that after the incident, one of the workers on site told the group that she had never seen a cable car get stuck for so long before.

Although rare, cable car tragedies have happened and when they did, they were devastating.

One of the more catastrophic ones happened in Italy in May last year, when a cable car carrying 14 people plunged to the ground on the Mottarone mountain after hitting a pillar.

Only a five-year-old boy survived. His parents, younger brother, great-grandparents and the rest of the people in the cable car died.

Correction December 17, 2022: A previous version incorrectly described the altitude as being 'above ground'.