And certainly there was much anger amongst my fellow passengers, many of whom vowed never to fly into Ringway again - which was the main point of my post. We can all shrug our shoulders and say that it's reasonable to wait 49 minutes
Right, I think you are missing a huge point here. You arrived 37 minutes early, and got onto stand 10 mins late. So, 10 mins is not that long of a delay, and any flight arriving 10 minutes either side of the scheduled arrival time is 'on time' in my opinion. Therefore, passengers were angry that they arrived at gate 'on time'?
Is there any other form of transport in the world where pax get pi**ed off at arriving on time?
I agree with easy flyer that a severe lack of communication from the flight deck is to blame for the 'anger' here.
Put it this way, which sounds better:
'we have to wait 47 minutes as there is no stand'
'we have arrived 37 minutes early and there is currently an aircraft on our allocated stand, so unfortunatly we will have to wait until the other flight departs'
Both statements are true, but one is worded much better.
As far as I remember, only stands 12 and 31 at T1 can handle the A340-600 due to the size, so, when an aircraft is parked on either stand, there is nothing that can be done about that, especially if you land 37 minutes ahead of your allocated time. Like has been said before, MAN cant leave stands available for a particular flight an hour before it arrives, especially where at a time where there is a high volumes of nightstopping aircraft and arrivals.
I think this whole thing has been completely blown out of proprortion and the people on this flight completely over-reacted.