Like cancelling a flight and telling the passengers to wait 3 days for the next one (due to the flight only being 2 weekly) if they want to get there, as happened to my friend last year? Rather wait 8 hours than 3 days, but obviously a matter of opinion.
You seem to have missed my point. I am talking about a high density important very short haul route which is also the first leg for long-haul flight connections.
When the Wed. evening BA inbound DUB had to divert BA knew at that point that it would not be available for its early morning departure from DUB. I know for a fact that text messages were sent to intending pax just before 2am Thursday morning telling them to go to the airport and rebook. So, they never had any intention to operate the flight as scheduled despite having buckets of time.
Are you telling me that BA didn't have a spare aircraft knocking about to position for a quick DUB-LHR rotation? Pax would have been at the airport from 6am so they were left frustrated until mid-afternoon. BA could even have sent over a bigger a/c and filled it with stranded EI pax.
The so-called legacy carriers are always claiming to be "better" than the Lo-Cos. My point was that FR made the effort whereas BA made not the slightest. If they couldn't handle just one affected flight any better than they did I'd hate to be around them in a major disruption situation.