I can't help but notice that the airline professionals here are quick to respond with what they believe are acceptable reasons/excuses.
Hotel Tango,
Are we reading the same thread? I've not seen anyone try to offer up acceptable reasons or excuses, as you call them, be they from the industry or not. It's very easy for you to say..
Sorry folks, keeping passengers (i.e. customers) virtual prisoners for 9 hours when they have effectively arrived at their destination city is simply not acceptable at all
..but that was one of my points. Possibly, for some of those passengers, they hadn't effectively arrived in their destination city. Their destination city may not have even been in the UK, in which case they may not have had visas and therefore would not have been allowed to enter the UK to be bussed to LHR. Could they have been given emergency visas? I don't know. Hopefully, someone from the ground will be able to answer that along with my question on the airports responsibility.
Most of the airline professionals on here are the same people that are directly in the firing line in an incident like this. We don't want to be stuck in this sort of situation anymore than the passengers do. We were merely trying to explain some of the issues that may have arisen to escalate this mess into the shambles it became. That doesn't mean that we think the explanations relieve the companies involved of any responsibility or that what happened doesn't need investigating.