EasyJet passengers told 'get off the plane or you will be arrested'

[cwatters]

They might have got 30 volunteers had the rest known they wouldn't have their bags.

[Jonty]

They should have de-fueled it, and taken the hit on time and money.

The last time I was involved in de-fueling in BHX it took about 30mins to find an empty bowser. And there are plenty of fuel hungry aircraft in BHX in which you can empty a full bowser.

This sounds like a time and cost issue, probably mostly time. Crew hours, knock on delays, airport opening hours that sort of thing.

It was a cock up and Easy Jet should have put their hands up and got it sorted.

[AlpineSkier]

@ Agaricus Bisporus

Short of paying a decent overnight allowance and being very sympathetic in the face of no doubt endless furious abuse there's very little the airline can do but apologise. They can't achieve the impossible.

What the cheapskates could have done, would have been to offer immediately to pay the E 250 that the law requires , instead of seeing if they could gat away with less ( initial offer of E 100). That action alone makes them looks like miserable creeps, which is further compounded by deliberately not telling hte remaining passengers that all their luggage is being off-loaded.
As already pointed out, this is hugely more problematical and expensive than beach-holiday luggage.

As for not protesting, well I have to say that companies ( in all industries) will sometimes make decisions that favour themselves but are not immutable. Under such circumsatnces loud protest can change matters : an example of this being the passengers in Marseille in December who protested at their non-stop flight to Morocco being routed via Bordeaux and extending flight-time by 5-6 hours. Their protest resulted in a delay of a couple of hours and a direct connection if I remember correctly.

In short , I think you're wrong about selfishness and just delaying others for longer.It may be possible to alter matters but you won't know until you try.

[Skipness One Echo]

It always saddens me that people have no courage in these situations. I include myself. Daring the crew to have Police filmed arresting passengers and dragging them off easyJet would have been a PR nightmare too far.

A filmed viral youtube clip can be a killer.
People nicked, kids screaming, mothers weeping etc. Stelios would have gone nuts about damage to the brand. People on here and skytrax are manageable, screaming children on film with Poicemen is calamatous and would have encouraged another approach. ie Take the delay and defuel, putting all your passengers first rather than keeping the aircraft on time for it's next mission.

Of course the next flight would be delayed as there is no slack in the business model. Hmmm

[wowzz]

Having had a similar experience in ALC, where the last 25 pax were denied boarding, due to a weight issue, I would just say that EZY paid all our costs, plus full compensation within 14 days.
Still not overly happy, but at least we did not have to fight 'tooth and nail' for our money.

[Parapunter]

ts a pity though that the passengers haven't the wit to see that arguing and wailing that it's not fair can't change the situation. 37 had to get off eventually, and chosing to fight or argue just makes a difficult situation doubly unpleasant. If they refuse to walk off than maybe they have to be carried or everyone is delayed there all day. But why screw everyone else up just because something doesn't suit you? That is plain selfishness.

Those pesky paying customers getting in the way of playing airyplanes again!

Another way of looking at the situation is that having paid in advance and formed a contract with Easy Jet, that they then sought to break, doubtless ruining many carefully laid holiday plans in the process, it was not beyond the 'wit' of some of those same passengers to allow which ever cretin who thought it was a good idea to invoke the Police to play that particular brinksmanship game and have their subsequent day in court. In for a penny, in for a pound.

What is of interest to me is that faced with a difficult operational situation, Easy once again didn't miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity and chose to inconvenience their paying customers rather than their balance sheet. You pay your money, you take your choice.

And Mushroom man, you have once again shown the misanthropy that makes you perfect for airline work. Every time AG, every single time.

[dontflyeasy]

Not a pilot. Just one of the passengers on the flight. Very clear to me it was the person putting on the fuel who stuffed up. They put 10 tonnes too much fuel on, which left us 5 tonnes over our maximum take off weight. Pilot was very angry and you could see that. Actually easyjet told us fairly promptly that the compensation would not be £100 but 250 euros. The main delay was the pilot could not get through to easyjet to clarify this, and he was stood at the front of the plane on his mobile for all of us to see.

As soon as the 250 euros was clarified, we chose to get off and make our own way to resort. Our main delay was they would not allow us to get our luggage until all 36 passengers were off loaded - so having "volunteered" we had to wait over 2 hours to get the case. All this said we know we got the better deal and are very releived we chose to get off.

The one point I would say is that the flight was not going anywhere until 36 people got off, so the longer everyone sat there staring at each other the longer the delay was. We all also knew GVA closed at 2330, so if we did not take off then it would be cancelled.

We were told, Birmingham did not have the capabiilty to offload fuel - I saw no reason for the pilot to lie, as we were also told if we had the engines on for about 2 hours it would also burn off the fuel, but easyjet were not prepared to do this.

Look there was a stuff up, in my view the person/company putting on the fuel and it affected all of our holidays. The big point for me is I think the plane was always going to go with no luggage (I don't think 36 people (given 4 of the 36 were aged between 3 and 6) equates to a change in the calculated take off weight of 5 tonnes), but they could not tell everyone as there would have been a riot.
Am I happy with Easyjet no, but they have followed through with my compensation and my full refunds, so they have doen what they said they would - yes I did have to call and hold for a long time to ensure they did it adn that irked me

[WHBM]

Am I being too simplistic ....... ?

All pax off into lounge, take off empty, 30 minutes or less at low altitude with the speedbrakes deployed, back to pick them up again with it all burned nicely off.

Yes there's a cost. That's one of the costs of doing business in aviation when there's been a screwup.

[rodthesod]

WHBM

Am I being too simplistic ....... ?

I don't think so. I'm not familiar with the type but it would be interesting to know how much they really were over MTOW at BHX on a cold day and, if they took off at MTOW, how much over MLW they would have been at destination. I would have thought that your idea plus, if necessary, a medium level flight to GVA with gear down and brakes out could have done the trick. An expensive exercise but well worth it for PR.

[John R]

AP: rubik101 is a Ryanair captain.

As for the "inconvenience" caused to the passengers, perhaps they would have preferred to experience an overweight take-off? I think the potential consequence might just have been more "inconvenient" than losing their bags. Someone has to explain to people why this stuff is important.

Parapunter: my post applies to you too.

[Joao da Silva]

s for the "inconvenience" caused to the passengers, perhaps they would have preferred to experience an overweight take-off? I think the potential consequence might just have been more "inconvenient" than losing their bags. Someone has to explain to people why this stuff is important.

They make their plans and pay their money in the expectation that the airline will do a competent job in getting them to destination.

If the refueller screwed up, they are easyJet's supplier, so it's easyJet's problem.

Why don't you grow up and empathise with a plane load of people who had their holidays screwed, one way or the other.

This incident is simply unacceptable.

[Parapunter]

This is the point. Time & again, in this forum for passengers do we see something really quite unpleasant take place at an airport and get commented upon, only for a pilot/engineer/atco, whoever wander along and tell us that we should sit up and listen to a technical explanation about why such and such happened and run along now.


As a passenger it's not my job to understand the technical details of airline operations. My job is to fund it.

The sooner some of you big watched aerial legends actually begin to understand this, that we pay for everything you get to do, everything, then we may at last begin to rehabilitate the reputation of certain companies and actually create an appeal for the service beyond price which is frankly what so many of them rely upon.

So, John R, your post actually does not apply to me at all does it?

[wesleyscott]

it seems to me to be a gaff of unrefound proportions....10 tons extra is not just a mistake its an immense error for which someone should get maulled for.
Apparantly it only takes 4 tons to fly from birmingham to geneva (i dont know but my pilot friend told me) so load an extra 10 tons above that seems a huge screw up.

[Agaricus bisporus]

Well, as demonstrated by dontflyeasy who was actually on that flight just about every prediction I made was correct, except that EJ fronted up with the full 250Eu right away. A bit different from the version peddled by the daily hate and some others here...

Parapunter, completely wrong once again. You really ought to wait until you're in posession of the facts before shooting your Big I Am line and once again demonstrate your extraordinary arrogance as a member of the public who always knows the Professionals' business better than the Professionals themselves. As shown by the subsequent posts, you don't, and quite contrary to your pavlovian assumptions of lousy customer care dontfly seems to tell a quite different story. Or do you know bettter than someone who was actually there?

Anyway, no need to let mere facts get in the way of a good rubbish-an-airline post, is there?

[Sunnyjohn]

Can someone explain why they couldn't have unloaded the equivalent of ten tonnes of Pax and luggage rather than 37 Pax and all the luggage?

[Dropline]

If (for example) they had chosen to offload 50 pax and just their bags rather than 37 pax and ALL the luggage, they would have had to offload all the bags, identify and remove each bag belonging to the 50 pax who weren't travelling, then reload the rest of the baggage. This would have taken a considerable amount of time. Much quicker just to take off all the bags. And offloading the minimum amount of pax means they have to pay less compensation.

[Bealzebub]

Am I being too simplistic ....... ?

All pax off into lounge, take off empty, 30 minutes or less at low altitude with the speedbrakes deployed, back to pick them up again with it all burned nicely off.

Yes, you are being too simplistic. It really isn't as simple as that. For one thing flying with prolonged use of the speedbrake (spoilers extended) in icing conditions can result in ice forming behind the spoilers such that they will not retract properly. This really isn't a good situation to get yourself into. On top of that, "flying around for 30 minutes" in reality will likely involve a couple of hours of pre-flight/ post-flight planning before the next service can commence. That will likely have implications on flight crew duty hours. Then there are the other operational constraints such as airport opening hours, ATC slots, Runway movement slots, etc. Nothing is ever as simple as it might seem.

As other people have already pointed out, de-fuelling an aircraft is a difficult procedure, in that it requires an available empty bowser. In the UK and many other countries, fuel companies will not permit delivered fuel to be returned to a bowser, due to quality control and potential contamination issues. The same holds true for empty bowsers, unless the bowser itself can be cleaned before it is then subsequently used. That may be possible, but it will never be a quick process. In effect the over-fuelled aircraft may (as in this case) become a technically compromised aircraft. That compromise being the payload it can transport.

There are very few experienced pilots who haven't at one time or another had a situation where their aircraft is over-fuelled. There are cross-checks that should be put in place to minimize this risk. For example the fueller should be given a specified quantity of fuel to upload. This should result in a manual stoppage should the automatic systems fail to cut out. In addition the pilot doing the pre-flight inspection should monitor the uplift at the bowser whenever practical. However it is likely that at many airports the monitoring function is contracted to another party. On the vast majority of occaissions the delivery is fine, rarely (as in this case) it isn't.

Clearly nobody would want the problems that this type of event would cause. From the "eyewitness" report here, the Captain was clearly annoyed. Naturally and quite understandably so were the passengers. I can't quite understand where the threat of "having people arrested" came from, since in the ordinary course of events, such a threat would be entirely improper and ill advised.

There are procedures that would have to be effected for this type of unfortunate event, and by the sound of it, they were put in place. For the passengers this sort of event is clearly unacceptable, and whatever compensation is offered or accepted, will do precious little to assuage the damage or inconvenience suffered. In any over-fuelling situation, be it a communication, technical, or monitoring failure, there will likely be procedural change or reinforcement in order to prevent similar occurances. Obviously that doesn't help the people involved in this particular event, and without doubt these events will continue to happen as long as any scope for error exists.

I think that the "professional" responses here are given to present technical explanations, rather than excuses or justification for error. Sometimes the artistry in the job lies in how you deal with these difficulties once they do arise. For a Captain, that artistry means balancing diplomacy and information dissemination with a dozen other variables all at the same time. It can sometimes be hindered by conflicting information from other sources, and sometimes with the best will in the world you simply don't have the ability to satisy as many people as you might wish to.

[spannersatcx]

Refuelling today is done by the bowser drivers, not by engineers or pilots.

Not in our airline it's not, saves situations like this! (hopefully)

We've had it in the past where miss communication is the error, that's why it is always written down by the crew, or if done via headset we readback say 80.9 as 80 decimal 9, as many years ago we were told 89, when in fact they wanted 80.9.

Sunnyjohn I believe they were 5T overweight by the fact they had 10T too much fuel on rather than 10T needing to be offloaded.

Can't see that it would be that difficult to defuel a 320 by 5T, would take 40-60mins at the most, it was probably the cost of having to do it that was baulked at or maybe not even considered, far easier to offload a few pax.

[YorkshireTyke]

Please spare us the pilot was only a messenger nonsense.

So YOU know how it happened - right ?

please DO tell.

[flying lid]

Pay peanuts for tickets, Get monkey airlines.

Lid