Pax reaction to weather delays
1992… my first 2 sectors in command after the 744 conversion were a HKG-SEL-HKG shuttle, having got the HKG approval observing as heavy crew on the way in. Left HKG in the morning with long turnaround for evening departure back to HKG, as the first leg of the aircraft’s SEL – HKG – LHR schedule, with Korean Airlines and Cathay having similar timed SEL-HKG-LHR departures. A typhoon was expected to arrive at HKG by the time these flights were due to arrive and forecast to be pretty severe.
It seemed to me that there migt be some possibility (!) of not actually getting in off the IGS approach at night in a major typhoon when only just qualified on type and previously only having landed the simulator at HKG. So I had a chat with the station manager and ops control regarding best options from a commercial viewpoint. My initial preference was just to delay to allow for a forecast improvement to materialise. However, apparently a very similar situation had occurred a couple of months earlier, Cathay and Korean had departed on schedule but BA had delayed. This had resulted in major ructions in the terminal and some bad publicity. The advice was take lots of fuel, divert wherever I wanted but get out of Seoul as a repetition would probably have “serious adverse repercussions” ! The fact that the Cathay and Korean flights never got in to HKG on the previous occasion and their passengers ended up with a much longer delay than the BA ones didn’t apparently figure in the local thinking….
We did managed to get in on the first attempt, but I felt justified in liberating a bottle of fizz for the crew bus …… As it happened, BA had just started a Seoul cabin crew base a few weeks earlier. In the bus the senior Korean stewardess very excitedly told me this was the first time she had landed in Hong Kong as a crew member …. I told her it was mine too. I'm not sure she believed me - she just said “Ah – you are a very very funny Captain!”!