So, now that we have some information as opposed to the usual uninformed hysteria from the usual incredibly well informed and well qualified idiots who seem to be allowed to talk absolute rubbish on this forum, we now discover that things were not indeed as advertised.
I pointed out in post #18 that many airfields in Europe have regulations about the use of APUs (or running engines on the ground).
Now that we seem to have established that 189 pasengers were not actually fried in a death tube for 5 hours on the ground, perhaps I can add a little bit of levity.
I arrived at a Scandinavian airfield in the middle of the night in the winter and, after a few minutes, a Jobsworth came out in his Land Rover, stormed into my flight deck and made it quite clear that if I did not shut my APU down, then I was going to go no further.
It was -20 centigrade outside and we were not going to be there for very long so this seemed quite unreasonable to me. I asked him why I had to do this.
He said it was for noise regulations and, as a captain, I should already know this because it was written in their Jeppessen charts. (I had already read them and had decided to ignore this bit because of the sub-zero temperatures).
So, I closed down the APU and started up the brake fans (which I didn't need but they made more noise than the APU).
He came back quite quickly and told me to shut down the APU.
I pointed out to him that the APU had indeed been shut down but my Brake Fans were now on and when he managed to get orders about the use of brake fans in his airport's Jepessens, then I would be very happy to oblige.
For those IDIOTS out there who think that those of us up front are not trying to do the best for you in the cabin, I have no comment.