"People will always be hacked off if delayed or cancelled, but they get really p***ed off when people lie to them or abandon them. Tell the truth about delays!! Why blame Air Traffic if a jet has gone tech??"
That virtually sums up most of the previous few pages of posts. Never lie, you will always be caught out - and rightly so too!
The lazy, self-interested TriShaw crew who left an aircraft load of passengers to the pax liasion officer to sort out at some South American airport in the middle of the night typify the worst of the AT world. Little did they know that the pax liaison officer was the new MPA Sqn Ldr Air. Big mistake....BIG! As OC twenty one and sixpence soon found out.
Those of us who had other backgrounds before joining the AT/AAR world always seemed to me to be more interested in looking after our passengers than the dyed-in-the-wool route queens or Dulles dinosaurs. Whether that meant phone-patching Wattisham MT control abeam Dakar to get the fighter mates' bus rolling or whatever, we were always keen to do that bit extra. I don't know whether that's because we'd all suffered ourselves in the past or whether we were basically more interested (and capable) than stereotypical 'truckies', but our pax were always thankful.....