Originally Posted by
Vokes55
So what exactly would you have done differently? Cancel the flight before it left Edinburgh like the majority of other carriers would have given the risk of not making it back within hours? Forced the crew to work beyond their legal flying limits? Left the passengers onboard or in the terminal until a standby crew could've been called out to fly them to Edinburgh (probably around 7am earliest)? Put all the passengers on the next available flights back to Edinburgh from Gatwick (on a half term Friday)? Genuinely interested in the armchair CEO solution.
Does it? I've had many flights that have gone within 10 minutes of max FDP. There was a French ATC strike on the same day, the flight took an Oceanic routing to avoid French airspace, and could've been subject to ATC slots (yes, even at that time of night). The crew would've tried to get back to Edinburgh, but the max FDP is a boundary that cannot be willingly crossed, even by a minute. Something as simple as a pushback delay due to ramp congestion, having to wait at the runway holding point for an arrival, avoiding weather en route, less favourable winds than forecast or having to reduce cruising speed due to turbulence could make or break the ability to legally get back to EDI or not.
If they knew they were going to Gatwick before they departed, the company would've had an extra four hours to arrange onward travel for the moment they arrived
It’s not in TUI’s interest to cancel flights so no, of course I’m not suggesting that. In this kind of situation though they normally tend to bring in a standby aircraft/crew to operate the flight (rather than wait 4 hours for whatever issue there was to be resolved) or operate only the outbound and reschedule the inbound until the next day, putting the passengers up in a hotel down-route (I appreciate this is expensive but they ended up having to do it at LGW anyway). I can safely say the vast majority would have preferred to have their flight delayed by approximately 24 hours and have another night in Lanzarote than be dumped at Gatwick, wait outside in the cold for hours to be put in a hotel and then face a 10-hour coach journey the following afternoon/evening.
Obviosuly I can’t say for sure whether or not they ever intended to go to EDI but a passenger has been quoted as saying the onboard screens displayed LGW as the flight’s destination. Whether the crew tried to ‘hide’ this and then only inform them five minutes before landing, I again don’t know (I am, of course, not suggesting the crew willingly did this but that it’s perhaps what the company asked them to do). As the other poster suggested, with so much uncertainty over whether they could make EDI, should they really have departed at all? I appreciate LGW is a bit closer but the flight still took around 4 hours.
Again, don’t take this as questioning the crew’s abilities as I am absolutely not doing so but rather the company’s transparency with its customers. From experience, both personally and anecdotally, in this case and also in previous cases (with TUI), it doesn’t tend to be delay itself that bothers passengers so much, but rather, a lack of information and poor aftercare (certainly valid in this case). TUI often do well in dealing with delays (they seem to have done reasonably well with the LPA fiasco this evening, at least for cruise passengers anyway, but again, lack of information is a common theme) but one could argue this is expected of what is a holiday company and not just another budget airline. I would say Jet2 certainly have them beaten in this area.