Delay Stories

[PAXboy]

Whilst enjoying a delay at Luton, I am wondering about your best delay story?

This one is simple: LTN ~IOM to see mother, a route that I do three times a year. The island is fogged and so a 3.75 hour delay - currently. Polite staff and voucher but it is one of those days when Priority Pass really pays for itself in one!

Whilst I can sit here and PPRuNe, the only drawback is that the TV has football on it. :*

BUT the real kicker is this: This morning I thought, should I take the Walkman? Nah, short trip, I've got enough stuff to take, so I'll leave it out. Hah!!! Boy do I want my CDs now to mask the footie. Not to mention the bloke chomping Twiglets with a sound like a concrete mixer. Since he has now sat down at the neighboring PC, I'm off to read the paper! :hmm:


So, what are your best/worst delay stories?
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"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

[Wannabe Flyboy]

Mid 1990s, Lanzorote. Waiting to board a charter Monarch flight to Gatwick but due to 'late arrival of inbound aircraft' we had a whopping 4 hour delay.

That's bad enough alone but coupled with 30 degree heat and a broken air conditioning system in the airport...

[Globaliser]

Once upon a time, I thought that I might give RYR a try on a no risk trip, just to see for myself what all the fuss is about. So I got a £17 return day trip to Glasgow. Sorry, I mean Prestwick. Fly up from STN mid-morning on a Saturday, come back on the first legal return, back at STN in good time to go to Jamie Oliver's parents' pub and see whether that's as good as it's cracked up to be.

On the way up, it was a bit foggy. Nothing much to worry about, had heard aircraft inbound for LHR overhead my place in the morning, etc. Checked in at STN, no problems mentioned.

So we went through to the departure area and got a coffee, and then noticed a delay notification to our flight, amongst others. Funnily enough, the scheduled carriers seemed to be managing reasonably normal ops, but the low fares were socked in. So we had breakfast, then a walk and a shop, then lunch. Some later flights went out closer to schedule, but earlier flights including ours were still delayed - probably, I suspect, because of some aircraft had been affected first thing but others hadn't.

Finally it got to the point where we knew that even if our flight left right then, it would not leave us enough time to check in for the return flight back from PIK - which, it seemed, was going to be on time if the outbound flight of that aircraft from STN was anything to go by. So we decided to try to call it a day and see whether RYR would refund us our tickets.

Easier said than done. RYR has no customer service airside. There is a phone, but that happily produced an engaged tone. After some discussion with the security people, I negotiated my way back through security to the check-in area and made my way to the RYR ticket desk. That had a queue which snaked almost outside the building and looked like it would be about two hours long.

Back through security to airside, get on the mobile phone, call their res number - desperation by this stage. Fortunately, it only takes about 10 minutes of holding to get through to a person - and to give her credit, the process of organising a complete cancellation and refund was approved (presumably by a supervisor) within a couple of minutes, once the agent could see the booked itinerary and the flight delays. And to give RYR credit, the money was back in my bank account in 4 days.

So that was my one and only attempt to go anywhere on RYR. It yielded a large bag of airside shopping at tax free prices, which made up a bit for the petrol and parking costs. And I'm sticking to BA in the future.

[manintheback]

End of holiday in the Bahamas, needed to connect to Miami for o/n flight back to the UK. - 5th in queue with my wife at Nassau and waited to check in - for 2 hours. Whereapon we were told flight was already full, but they were putting us on another flight 15 minutes later. Somehow I didnt believe them.

Went through to the departure area, where total utter chaos reigned as we found passengers who had been waiting over 24 hours to get home.
Transpired they had 'lost' their planes due to safety or financial reasons - never did find out which was true.

Thought I would be clever by buying 2 tickets with AA and worrying about getting money back later. Only to have the tickets removed on the say so of the other airlines supervisor who claimed I had no need of them as we were about to depart and they already had my luggage.

12 hours later we did indeed depart. 1.5 days later we got a flight back to the UK - and got downgraded just to rub it in. Interestingly large compensation claim went in.

[BOFH]

22 hours was my best. BA cancelled my flight and offered to send me back to SYD via HKG (from LHR). It was a family emergency so I assented. Okay, leave eleven hours later.

They neglected to mention that there was an eleven hour wait at HKG as well. I'd have been better off waiting for the next flight via SIN.

LHR-SYD, about 45 hours. Boy, I looked good when I landed.

It didn't matter - by the time I arrived my relative had died. Full marks to the BA lounge in HKG. My gold had dropped out but they let me in anyway. Very sympathetic.

BOFH

[WHBM]

Travelling Toronto to London via Newark because cheaper than any direct flight. CO to Newark then CO codeshare on Virgin to LHR. Arrived at Toronto in the evening to find our CO was cancelled, next one would have missed the connection. So they transferred us onto Air Canada nonstop, who were not only all loaded and ready to go but the only seats available were in Business.

We got to Heathrow 3 hours earlier than our schedule, to see the inbound Virgin was so late, also by about 3 hours, that the next CO from Toronto would have connected to it anyway.

Lovely quick comfortable flight and all at a bargain fare. Not much profit made by Continental on us.

I was also once on BA London to LAX which was cancelled at the last minute, the pax for New Zealand were rerouted via Singapore later that day. It's not often you get rerouted the opposite way round the world !

[1DC]

Did a 2 week holiday in Majorca flying with British Airtours, outbound on saturday morning had choice of three flights, 0700, 0730 or 0830. Picked 0830 and arrived at LGW to find 0700 and 0730 on time but 0830 departing at 1630. Taken away on a bus for lunch at a hotel and departed about 1630.
Return flight was at 1230 and on arriving to check in noticed that British Airtours were checking in the two earlier return flights but our flight didn't even have an arrival time. Found a rep and asked what the problem was, told that our flight wasn't due to arrive at Majorca until 0400 next morning and that a few passengers would be put on any empty space on the two other flights everyone esle would be "looked after". Decided to take a chance and gathering the wife and kids went and checked in on one of the earlier flights, given boarding passes without any comment whatsoever and spent an hour worrying if we would be dumped before the flight left..
Surprising I kept a watch on the flight number ,on ceefax,for the rest of the summer and that Majorca flight was always between 8 and 18 hours late every saturday.

[IB4138]

Back in the good old days of Brymon and the Dash7's...when they used to fly Plymouth,Newquay, Heathrow.
Last flight of day from Plymouth to LHR was delayed for aprox.
4 hours.

To the astonishment of my colleague and I, an announcement was made that whatever refreshments we required were available from the bar/cafe, on production of boarding cards. That included draught Stella!

A resting BA 747 pilot, we were chatting to in the lounge couldn't believe it...thought someone had made a mistake... on checking it was confirmed that we could have unlimited amounts of whatever we wanted.....so we didn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Many happy, pizzed passengers went to Heathrow that night!
They fed us more free booze on the flight.:ok:

[Hartington]

In Macau, due to go back from Hong Kong to London that night. The rep of the company we'd booked our day trip on suddenly rushed us back to the port to catch the last Jetfoil back to Hong Kong because of an approaching Typhoon. Went to Kai Tak to check in (me to London, my then girlfriend, later my wife, to Bangkok (all that might give some date clues)) only to be told the plane couldn't get into Kai Tak. They put us in an hotel overnight. Next day we waited all day until they took us back to Kai Tak. There we discovered that there were 3 747s and 1 VC10 (the old Tokyo/Johannesburg flight, more clues) which had been waiting at various airports around the Far East waiting for the weather to lift. In the end, only 2 of the 747s came to Hong Kong and we all crowded aboard. My girlfriend missed her connecting flight to Kathmandu from Bangkok and was therefore further accomodated by BA there until the next RNAC flight to Kathmadu 36 hours later and I got back to London 24 hours late (and before she arrived in Kathmandu).

Then, even more years ago, I was in San Francisco when the controllers were on a go slow. My route home was San Francisco/Chicago/Toronto/London (don't ask). I should have been able to leave San Francisco in the morning to catch the overnight from Toronto back to London but I decided, due to the go slow, to catch the overnight to Chicago. That was delayed about 3 hours but got me back into Chicago in time for an earlier flight to Toronto which was duly delayed but got me to Toronto in time for the AC back to London. I was sitting eating soup back home next day when, I'm told, I gently went to sleep and was prevented from sleeping in the soup!

This year has had a bad start. Tried to go to Geneva three weeks ago on a Sunday night for a one day meeting on Monday. Flight cancelled due snow in Geneva (and talking to others later this was a genuine problem, stories of diversions to Lyon earlier in the day with bus connections). No alternative available for Monday morning so I cancelled, does that count as an indefinite delay? And, back in January, I arrived at Gatwick one evening to be told that my flight to Nantes was cancelled and that I was being put in the Hilton and flown the next morning. That worked but the fact that they got the passengers from the cancelled on the flight next morning with seats to spare did me make wonder (probably unfairly) how genuine the technical problem was.

[CargoOne]

The worst one I ever had was about 80 (eighty) hours due to weather conditions at one major gateway airport on Russian Far East.

Last weekend my friends stucked for about 35-40 hrs or so due to AOG of the charter plane (A320) supposed to take them to sunny holidays destination.

[Curious Pax]

Visited Florida in 1988 on my own, but decided to route out via New York for a couple of days tourist stuff on the way. Great flight out on an American Trans Air TriStar, and then on to Miami on US Airways. A couple of weeks later flew back up to JFK, then headed for the checkin only to be given a food voucher and told that that the flight would be going at midnight instead of 2000. This time the airline was Trans International (a short lived charter carrier, not the Trans International that became Transamerica), who were flying a couple of DC8s at the time. Transpired that our aircraft was sick, so they were going to use their other aircraft, but it had to be flown in from Las Vegas. No big deal - I had a good book to read.

Unfortunately as we gathered at the gate, the Nigerian Airways staff (they were handling the flight) then had to tell us that our aircraft had blown a tyre on landing, but they were trying to source a new one. Chatting to the engineer as we were boarding, it turned out that the captain had to do a tour of the maintenance hangars and ended up buying a new tyre from ABX, cash in hand, including fitting! We finally took off at dawn (5am), with a fuel stop at Gander before arriving at Stansted nearly 10 hours late. Then it was off into London to get a train to Manchester, so didn't get home until after midnight, with work the next day - which wasn't the most productive one I've ever had!

Learnt a lesson that day to look a little further than just the price when buyin air tickets!

[rsoman]

Not happened to me, but one of my friends was on the flight.

Indian Airlines, Madras - Bangkok, one hour into the the three hour flight, pilot informs plane returning back due to tech, landed back in Madras , pax waited for a couple of hours, switched to another aircraft.

90 minutes on, beleive it or not, the new aircraft develops tech problems, plane return backs to Chennai again.

Another 6 hours later, third time lucky- the latest aircraft made it through!!! (All three a/c were A320s).

[cjhants]

good old air atlanta -doing the travel city LGW - Sanford route. 5 day delay !!! our first and last trip with that carrier (if i had found PPRUNE before i booked, and read some of the postings, i would never have booked).
last summer thought we were going to be lucky and get out a day before the arrival of one of the hurricanes (thursday). all the other flights were out on time but ours was `see agent.` for technical reasons our flight was not coming out, and would not come until after the hurricane had passed. we managed to find somewhere to see out the storm, and eventually got out by ATA the following tuesday.
the ATA flight was at least in a 757 that seemed to look OK, not the 747 that looked and felt like is was ready for the boneyard.

[BEagle]

Spanish ATC strike, all flights from Menorca cancelled, so back to my parents' villa with a young lady I'd been introduced to ealier in my holiday - and her mother.

Baking hot, so a midnight swim for the 2 of us seemed an excellent idea - and so it was :D

Back the next day to Gatwick at FL170 in the DanAir 707 as that was all that Capt Sintes could talk ATC into.

As for the young lady; well, she's as lovely now as she was back then in 1977! :ok:

[Globaliser]

BEagle: ;) :D :ok:

[PAXboy]

BEagle, I agree :ok:

Thanks for the stories. My delay landed up being 5.5 hours and a very easy one, as I just stayed in the lounge and read the paper, drank brandy + coke, used the web connection and snoozed a bit. The TV went over to Rugby which was better as the crowds don't make such a horrible noise as football crowds do.

I learnt that the a/c had been diverted the previous evening. The last LGW home met fog and went to MAN. Once IOM opened on Saturday, they had to get back from MAN and then do the first LGW run. By the time we were on finals (around 19:00) the fog was gathering again. It was thin vertically but thick horizontally. They had to do an instruments approach and (I learnt from the Captain on leaving) not knowing if they would see the tarmac before reaching minimums. They did and we put down (no autoland) but on the roll-out, you could not see the terminal buildings. A cautious taxi up the hill was employed.

My thanks to the crew, who were very tired and remained cheerful and gave good service to the very last.

My worst was being caught at JFK in the power blackout of August 2003! I was delayed by three days but only one night in an hotel. I got back to friends in New Jersey and got another day on the beach!

Home t'row and the rain will keep the fog away. By the way, to the Northern Hemispherians ... Welcome to Spring as today is the vernal equinox. Must be time for the shades... :cool:

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"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

[Pax Vobiscum]

Apologies to those who've heard this one before!

A colleague and I were starting a 10-day whistle-stop tour of the US in cattle class on the (now discontinued) BA187 from BHX to JFK via GLA and the date was 13/03/94, which some may recall was when the boys in green decided to drop some mortars (which luckily failed to detonate) onto the runway at LHR.

We were already boarded, but were told what was happening and that our departure would be delayed because lots of flights into LHR with connecting pax for the states were being diverted, some to BHX. After an hour or so the flight, initially pretty empty (the service had only recently been launched), began to fill up.

While this was going on, it was noticeable that the aircraft (a 767) was rocking on its stand and the flags in front of BHX were standing straight out. Yes, there was a 'hurricane' on its way (parts of the UK experienced almost 100mph winds). We took off (a couple of hours late) without incident, but getting into GLA was a different matter - high crosswinds necessitated a go around and there were plenty of white knuckles on display when we were finally planted safely but firmly on the ground.

Of course, with all the disruption to UK flights the aircraft was now full to the gunwales. The captain announced that because of the high winds we would be climbing quickly after take off and reinforced the need to keep seat belts fastened until the light went out. He also told us that to avoid the strong jet stream we would be taking a more northerly route than usual - he wasn't wrong as we later passed over Greenland, which I've only previously seen on west coast routings. This added further to our delay and we eventually arrived at JFK 6 hours late at 22:00 having been on board for 16 hours.

PS We were hoping to be able to catch the last evening flight for our onward connection to ATL, but this was foiled by a yellow cab who couldn't find his way from JFK to EWR!

[Irish Steve]

Worst delays I can recall have both been at LGW.

First was a transatlantic to MCO, we were due to travel on a Laker DC10-30 (Laker Mk II, American registered aircraft), but the 10-30 was tech, so they sent a 10-10 instead. As a result, we were warned that we would have to tech stop at one of the Canadian stops on the extreme eastern end, can't remember which it was, other than it was darn cold, minus something, (October) and we were all dressed for Florida, and had to walk across the ramp to the terminal building.

Anyway we all checked in, and at the appointed time, we boarded. Then we sat, and we sat, and we sat, watching all sorts of frantic activity outside on the ramp, as baggage cans were moved in all directions, unloaded and reloaded. Eventually, we were told that we were going to be departing shortly. Well, nearly. At this stage, we'd been sat in a full DC10-10 for close on 3 hours, and the humour was not improved any when we were told the reason for the delay. which was that (Pre 9-11 but still an American flight) the pre check in security check, and the check in bag count didn't agree, so the handling agents had been required to strip every can and ID the bags. Turned out that some *&&^^%%% at the check in had double tagged a bag. So, some 3 hours and a bit late, we pushed.


Start 3. Taxi to the hold. Wait a bit longer. Captain comes on the PA. Sorry folks, we've got a slight problem here, one of the gauges on the fuel system is not working correctly, we're going to have to go back to the gate to get it checked. Back we go, another 30 minutes, and we eventually launch. Cross the Atlantic, fuel stop, land in MCO about 5 hours late, which then caused "fun" as an entire DC10-10 worth of people are all boarding coaches to go to the same car hire company.

That's another hour and a bit in the queue, though we did quite well out of it, there was only the 2 of us that trip, we'd booked a group A, that was all we needed, the car hire rep did just about everthing that was legal to try and get us to upgrade, which I declined, and in the end, we got a 4x4 Jeep Cherokee, that was all they had left at that stage :O

In hindsight, the "fuel guage" was probably a good bit more complex, for the first sector to Canada, the IFE in the rear of the cabin was U/S, and the cabin crew were struggling to get meals hot and the hot drinks were'nt very. After the fuel stop, it was strange how everything was working 100%, I suspect that something more fundamental had tripped, but after looking at it, they'd decided to launch anyway to avoid all sorts of hassles with hours and the rest of the related aggravations.

To be fair to Laker, the trip back was a lot better, the 10-30 we were supposed to have had arrived, and it was configured in 3 classes, even though it was a charter, so some lucky passengers ended up in effectively first class. Yeah, we were lucky, and it was a very well configured 10-30, each leather reclining seat had it's own TFT screen IFE, and this was a good few years ago now, so we had a very pleasant flight back to LGW. It helped, as my wife had picked up a nasty bout of food poisoning, so a comfortable spacious seat made her flight a lot more relaxing.

Worst delay ever for me was also at LGW, I came in from the States on an overnight, and arrived in to LGW about 0630 ish, and was due to go on to DUB on a Cityflyer 146 at about 10:00. In the absence of anything else to do, I checked in, and then went through to departure, along with quite a few other people from the same flight.

There we sat, and sat, and sat, with no information or anything else from Cityflyer or the handling agents. By 14:00, I for one was starting to become distinctly hostile, not because of the delay, but because of the appalling bad attitude we were getting from the neanderthal at the Gatwick Handling desk, who was telling us NOTHING. Initially, we were all polite, and reasoned, but we got nothing in the way of information. After a while, the temperature rose, and along with it voices, but we might as well have been talking to a brick wall, the response was still identical.

The reason we were getting so irate was that we knew exactly what the problem was, DUB had been temporarily closed because of industrial action by the fire crews, which caused all sorts of knock on delays. They were telling us nothing, and provided nothing, not even refreshment vouchers, and at this stage, we'd been in airside departure for close on 6 hours.

By now, there was a group of very unhappy passengers around Gatwick Handling desk, and the desk clerk still refused to do anything, and would not even call a representative of the airline. The individual concerned came very close to being flattened by a couple of people, and even then he could not see that it was his total lack of respect for us that was causing the problem.

In the end, we got out very late in the afternoon. I decided then I was never flying Cityflyer again. I haven't.

[radeng]

My 'this years' delays have been BA and for tech reasons.

An FRA - LHR earlier this year where the outbound flight got delayed when on the walk round at LHR, the crew found evidence of a baggage cart collision with the a/c

The last one was a week ago where the inbound into NCE had a flaps problem on the approach and did a go around. Hardly surprising that the crew wanted a very full engineering check before taking off again..........

It just meant sitting in the Exec Club lounge longer - and trying not to drink too much!

When you consider that's 2 delayed departures out of 12, though, you ask 'is this too many?' Obviously, both justifiable from a safety viewpoint ( if the bloke in the left hand seat won't fly it, I'm not going on it), but still.......

[cwatters]

Globaliser wrote: ...and I'm sticking to BA in the future.

Your loss. I've been a regular on Ryanair around Europe for the past few years. About 6 times a year I think. Find them extreemly reliable. Can't remember when flight was last delayed.

Most interesting delay... We once got to STN so early there were no ground staff on hand. Had to wait ages to get OFF the plane.

[Globaliser]

cwatters: Your loss.I doubt it. I'd now have to do a lot of flawless FR sectors to get to my BA average, which is about one delayed sector in every couple of dozen. :D

[GwynM]

Lucky you. I work on about 50% delayed by 30 mins or more on the LHR-ABZ-LHR route.

[slim_slag]

On the only route I can think of where BA and FR go head to head (LGW-DUB), Ryanair are a lot better than BA. Ryanair also schedule the flight to take less time, making their results even more impressive.

http://www.flightontime.info/scheduled/keyroutes/2004.html

Other interesting data appears to show that those nasty US airlines appear to do better than their European competitors when flying out of LON :)

LHR simply sucks, one delayed flight out of a couple of dozen is not feasible when visiting that place. In fact the stats show that BA gets 69% of its flights 'on time' from LHR, putting it in 18th place for all carriers.

[pax britanica]

Late 1970s and I have to go to Seychelles and Mauritius on business-honest guv.

LHR to SEZ on a SVC10 via Nicosia, Khartoum and Addis Ababa. Nice trip-nice stay in SEZ. Time to leave and pick up the once a week BA 74 which routed LHR Bahrain Sez Mauritius .Sched departure 1 pm on Monday afternoon.

We do get boarded but nothing happens -flight engineer torch in hand head inside engine Time passes, eventually Captian says sorry folks we hit a bird on departure from Bahrain and damage worse than we thought. He didnt like the idea of three engines in the middle of Indian Ocean (have times changed for BA skippers -ie the infamous Manchester Diversion post now running). He says a new engine needs to be ferried in, we will be on the ground 'until tomorrow'.

Leaving aside the fun and games over hotels for 400 pax and crew we then get the classic domino effect delay.

How do you get a 74 engine to Seychelles-easy you fly it there in a chartered Herc from Jo'burg along witha engineering team.

Problem 1 To get to Seychelles from JoBurg means overflying countries not very friendly with South Africa so it a long long over water diversion taking maybe 9 hours for the trip.

Problem 2 Torrential rain when it arives and Sez has a very very tricky approach and it has to divert to Nairobi

Problem 3 Crew for Herc out of hours and need mandatory rest period of 12 hours ? before trying again

Problem 4 -how do you do an engine change ona 74 at an airport where the 74 is bigger than the terminal-answer you modify a cargo scissor lift which takes a fair while before you even start the job and then you have to be very very very careful not to drop it.

So the scheduled departure Monday 1300 becomes an actual departure Thursday 1300

3 entire days . Not BA's fault just one of those things (mind you doing an engine run power check on a 74 100 right next to a tiny cinder block and wood terminal with open windows is interesting)

Had a fair few delays since but nothing comes close to that one

PB

[Captain Rat]

A few years ago, with BA in SIN. They had a brand new 747-400 delayed for 24 hours in SYD. Luckily I new someone in SIN airport checkin so new the flight was delayed into SINonroute to LHR, so I didnt even go to the airport. The next day, turned up ontime, checked in, got to the gate and another tech delay was apparent. Due to flight crew hours on this long sector, BA again wanted to night stop the aircraft but due to a big convention in SIN at the time there was a lack of hotels for the pax. So after several hours the fault was fixed (we had been given food and drinks in the departure gate) we departed for London. Due to the crew hours we landed in Rome (I think), in the meantime BA had flown out a complete set of new crew on a 757 from London. So we landed in Rome, the new crew got on, the old crew sat in the cabin, fuel was uplifted together with some more food, and we were on our way in 45 minutes. Personaly I was impressed by the way BA looked after every one. Bet you wouldnt get this with RYN or EJ
You get what you pay for

[PAXboy]

Bet you wouldnt get this with RYN or EJ W-e-l-l, let's be fair we do not now [sic] what Ryan and easy would do, as they do not run these kind of operations. ;)

That said, their Ts&Cs are on their web site and are plain for all to see.

--------------------
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

[Gouabafla]

Three hour delay waiting for an Air Afrique plane from Lomé to Abidjan. Wasn't a long delay, but the power went off in the airport so there were no lights and no a/c.

Mind you, there may not have been any a/c even if the power had been on if other West African airports are anything to go by.

[diginagain]

Ah, Brymon, sorely missed! I wonder if the bar tab did for you?

When I worked offshore in the Netherlands, I flew Schiphol - Gatwick, with time to spare for the flight down to Newquay, which invariably ran on into a couple of hours delay due to late arrival of the inbound. I started to think it must have been just me, but the regulars told me it was like that nearly every day.

Then when I moved to working out of Aberdeen, I tried their Aberdeen-Newcastle-Bristol-Plymouth service, with a change of aircraft at Bristol, until they kept running out of aircraft at Bristol.

Since I was spending so much time on the road, I reverted to doing the journey from West Cornwall to Aberdeen by car.

[TightSlot]

My worst to date...

Land Salzburg @ 10:00 local: Starts snowing @ 10:15 when all pax disembarked. Continues snowing, more heavily. Inbound pax boarded @ 11:00 but SZG now experiencing intermittent runway closures: Expected departure 11:30. And then SZG ran out of de-iceing fluid - additional had to be driven in from Vienna (for chrissakes!)

Total delay 6 hours, with pax on board throughout (terminal too congested and would not allow them to disembark). No additional food on a/c and insufficient bar stock to maintain drinks/snacks throughout delay. IFE system u/s pending spares on that day only.

Obtained Commanders permission for pax to use mobile phones during delay: Most popular request was for phone number of airline MD. One man rang customer relations and then invited Commander and I to speak to them directly in order to "report" ourselves for "incompetence".

Not the longest delay by any means, but for both customers and crew, one of the least pleasant.

Ski pax - You gotta luv 'em!

[PAXboy]

TS I think that you have probably got the winning score there. Not in duration but for high quality aggravation!

A delay from South Africa to UK in 1990 was not an incovenience as such but it had a running problem....

It was a daylight (dep about 09:00) JNB~BRU via (I think) Kinshasha on Sabena. I was in club on the upper deck of the 743 and expected a beautifully quiet trip, with a simple connection on to LHR.

The stop went OK but we were about to enter Libyan air space when they closed it. We had to go west to get around them and Algeria. Then a tech stop for more go-juice in Casablanca (not allowed off, of course) then on to BRU. Delayed by all the summer traffic over Spain with difficult routing to add on, meant that we got in at midnight and so had to night stop (their expense) as the last London had gone.

Now, since I was in Club, what am I complaining about? The baby in the row behind me. :uhoh: It was very small and new and the mother appeared to be inexperienced as, whenever it made any noise, she simply poured milk into it. In due course, the baby 'overflowed' and the smell was :yuk:

In the upper deck of the 74, the locker bins are beside the window and provide a very good flat surface. These are particularly suitable for ... changing the baby's nappy... until the person sitting in the window seat one row in front hits the call button and points out the problem. :mad: I drank more alcohol on that trip than on ANY other trip in my life! A journey that is seared into my memory.

[Irish Steve]

Ski pax - You gotta luv 'em!

Knowing what the snow in SZG has been like for the last few seasons, as I have a friend that lives there, I would put money on it that most of the ski pax were totally p:mad:d off with sitting there watching the only snow fall they'd seen in the entire holiday.

I can remember a similar incident a few years back, it threw snow out of the heavens one evening at about 1800, so nothing was moving, with the result that we sat there for several hours more going nowhere.

Snag with SZG is that it has an evening curfew. So, we're now sitting there at 2240, and 2300 is the curfew. Eventually, we got start clearance, and were airborne by the tower clock at 22:59. Somewhere along the line, my watch "miraculously" gained about 3 minutes in that hour, as I reckoned we were airborne at about 23:03, and even more strange, those 3 minutes somehow migrated to LGW, as when we landed there later, my watch and the clocks in the terminal were somehow in agreement, exactly as they had been when I flew out a week earlier;) ;)

I never did find out how the crew managed to massage time so effectively, but how ever they did it, a 757 full of very stressed and tired passengers were VERY happy to be back in the UK.

[manintheback]

may as well have a delay story with a happy ending.

In 2001 I was commuting every Monday out to Paris from Heathrow T1 on the first BMI flight. Very heavy storms and winds had shut DeGaulle and caused trouble at other airports. Delayed 3 hours, took off got turned back over the channel and returned to Heathrow at midday. I went home but being self employed needed to get out there ASAP. On returning to T4 for a BA flight at 8 that night got chatting to a lady also waiting around. Eventually leaving at 11:30pm for a very early morning arrival in France

Married that lady last June.

[BOFH]

manintheback

Congratulations and many happy years together, you old romantic.

I had a similar thing - raced downstairs from my hotel in Tokyo for a taxi. Got one, but a lady had also started waiting for one, so I offered it to her.

Got to Narita with 45 mins but even in J checkin there was a huge queue for HKG. I missed the flight. Bugger!

Reseated with JAL, I went into the lounge and enjoyed a drink and a smoke for the six hours I would have to wait (I also missed an important meeting, and my boss would be Unpleased). When who should come up to me but ... the taxi lady. We sat and talked for a while before boarding, then discovered we were to have adjacent seats.

When we arrived in HKG, we found we were both staying in the Hyatt in Wan Chai.

When we both came back to Europe, I visited her not a few times in Paris, where she lived.

Unfortunately, and for tragic reasons outside our control, that was as far as it could go. But there's another semi-happy ending, anyway.

BOFH
(BTW, I had to reparse what you said when you mentioned 'another lady' in your post)

[Barnstorm]

Flew from LHR to JFK with Virgin to spend a few days in New York and then onwards to Nicaragua with Taca. After 2 days, I was to do the whole thing in reverse, but without the NY stopover. Well, I managed to miss my return flight to JFK and was told to come back the following day with $240 for a new ticket :*
So I go back to my hotel and turn up the next day only to find that the whole eastern seaboard of the states is snowed in and that no flights were leaving that day for NY.
Because I literally couldn't wait to get out of Managua (horrible place IMHO), I just asked to be put on their next flight to the US and said that I didn't care where it was going. I was offered a flight to Miami with Iberia and told it would be comped, the whole $240 thing never mentioned.
So now I am a thousand miles away and a day overdue for a connecting Virgin flight home; BUT - The weather is beatiful and I'd never been to Miami before, so I just thought what the hell....who am I to complain. Got a Taxi to Miami beach, booked a cheap hotel, stayed for 3 days, had an absolute blast and got a great tan.
The best part about it was, when I finally did make it to the miami airport, I went up to the Virgin desk handed over a ticket for a flight that had left New York 5 days earlier and was handed a boarding pass. Not an eyebrow raised or a question asked. Couldn't belive it.

[manintheback]

BOFH

Well old is accurate but not too sure about the romantic bit, have edited to clarify I am indeed of male gender and was single at time!

cheers
MITB

[BOFH]

manintheback

Sorry, I hope I didn't insult your grammar - it's one of the vagaries of the English language, much in the same way that 'old romantic' didn't mean I thought you were old. Now you have cleared that up for us :D It was a nice story and must have cheered a few of the rest of us up.

I was flying to SYD from JKT one night. One poor chap was flying J, like I, but was trying to get to PER (his wife was having a baby). Seems they were overbooked on his flight. Poor bugger managed to negotiate a flight via SYD in Y - best they could do. Must have been the longest flight of his life.

I wish all our stories sounded like yours or Barnstorm's.

BOFH