Originally Posted by
davidjohnson6
Earlier today a BA Cityflyer flight from Milan Linate diverted to Southend due to bad weather, and the return back to Milan also began in Southend (the aircraft spends Friday and Saturday night in Milan)
A single divert is pretty mundane, but what puzzles me is why a divert like this causes chaos. The E190 ended up landing at Southend just before 8 am. The pax for a 0940 departure fron LCY were checked in, luggage accepted at checkin desks, and only at the LCY gate just before gate-closing time were they told to then go collect their bags from arrivals, wait for a coach to take them to Southend and then end up departing SEN 4 hours after the original LCY departure time or 5h30 after the plane landed at SEN following bad weather
LCY-SEN is about 45 mins to drive. So why does a divert like this which should not be unexpected with winter weather take so long to resolve ? And no, the handling agents wouldn't say anything beyond the catch-all 'operational reasons' ! I don't mean to have a moan - more trying to understand why this all takes so long to be resolved, especially when SEN has ample spare airport capacity
If it wasn't planned, its having the staff availability to make the alternative arrangements in a short period of time and knowing of the availabilty of check-in staff / baggage handling agents at SEN being able to handle it at a certain point in time too. Whilst it seems passengers were informed of the arrangements "late in the day" at the gate - a number of other things will have been going off in the background. Perhaps one of them at some point will have been to continue the aircraft on to LCY should an improved weather window occur. Failing that, organising the onward transport can also take time and will have only been made when the decision to definitely operate the flight from SEN had taken place. There's no coaches just parked up idle at LCY waiting for such an event, so they have to be sourced and then will give an estimate of dispatch and journey time to get to LCY. Now, this is presuming it wasn't the only disrupted flight. If so, handling staff may have also been dealing with issues on any other disruptions and hold ups on delays too before being able to take on this disrupted flight. Another hold up before returning passengers on the flight back to the land-side area will have been to work with the airport on the best route to do this. Ensuring the luggage collection was ready - all whilst (presumably?) other operations were continuing at LCY including arriving flights using the baggage hall. That's all so far happened at LCY alone before even having to make a full new check-in at SEN, most probably under manual operating conditions (no BA check-in system) with most likely minimum staff due to having to protect their own flight schedules first and foremost. That's not even mentioning any crewing issues, flight planning changes etc. So perhaps 4 hours all in all isn't the worst.