MEDIA CENTRE - Off The Wall

Phil’s Travels – How to delay a flight by five hours (12.25)

Phil’s Travels – How to delay a flight by five hours

How do you delay a flight by five hours? Well, let me tell you a story.

We left home in the middle of the night and saw many foxes from our Uber. At Heathrow T2, we flew through procedures and boarded our plane to Brussels whilst it was being sprayed for ice.

Boarding our second flight at Brussels Airport was subject to the usual Brussels Airport chaos, with people ignoring queues and queues being ignored because there just isn’t enough space for multiple queues. The terminals at Brussels are long and narrow, meaning little space available at each gate and chaotic queues ensuing.

We finally boarded and assumed our seats at around 11.30. We were scheduled to take-off at 12.00.

Around 13.30 we got our first announcement. Apparently connecting passengers from Paris were able to check-in their luggage the day before travel in Paris and their luggage had been driven to Brussels in a truck. The Paris-luggage had then been loaded on to our plane. But the flight from Paris, with the owners of said Paris-luggage, had been cancelled, due to fog in the City of Light (clearly not so light that day).

Consequently, the Paris-luggage had to be removed from our plane. Quite rightly, it is against the law for a plane to fly with luggage that does not have its corresponding owner on-board.

Around 14.30 we were advised that the unloading process would take a long time because instead of loading the Paris-luggage into a single container (marked, say, ‘Paris-luggage’) and then loaded into the hold, the Paris-passengers’ bags had been spread throughout the plane in different containers. This meant unloading all the containers, opening each container and checking every single bag. For a full flight with over 300 passengers, this took a while. Many hours as it turned out.

To add to the chaos, during our bum-numbing wait on-board the plane, a passenger succumbed to the circumstances and became very ill. Within short order, two ambulances and four doctors appeared and whisked the poor sufferer away for treatment.

We finally took-off around 16.45, nearly five hours behind schedule. To be fair, the captain did organise for extra fuel to be loaded so he could fly faster than normal and make up some time. Naturally, my wife had the broken seat on our flight and used the broken parts as a right of passage to communicate with the crew. We had taken off so late, we had a brief moment of joy and enjoyed a stunning sunset at 30,000 feet.

My issues with the whole situation were multiple. How could they load luggage onto a plane without their corresponding owners (surely illegal or at least against protocol)? Why not put all such risky luggage in one container just in case of such eventuality, rather than spread it all over the hold? Would it have been quicker and cheaper for the airline to taxi all the Paris-passengers in a wonderful Uber from Paris to Brussels? As it was, I suspect the carrier will have lost a fortune thanks to their poor planning and flawed protocols. This was surely not the first time this had happened and yet they had not learnt from previous such events and made some 300 passengers very grumpy and compensation minded.

The purpose of our quick trip (not so quick as it turned out) was a huge success and I can even claim to have had dinner (albeit he sat on a different table from us) with one of the continent’s most famous persons – Roger Milla, of 1990 corner flag dance fame.

Our return to London was much smoother, albeit with further delays on both legs (no excuses given). During our absence, my world of sport witnessed extremes. On the one hand, Mo attacked Arne (surely LFC no longer bigger for the both of them) and on the other hand, nice-guy Lando beat bull-boy Max to the title in the climax to a most exciting and topsy turvy F1 season. Go Lando!