The Odyssey: One for the Books (Part 1)
Let’s start by saying I am writing this using Free WiFi at a very nice 3-star hotel in Leeds, Merry Olde England.
“Kar geldi,” as the Turks might say, the snow came.
For cost and timing reasons, we actually broke our Star Alliance fealty and flew with British Airways. The captain knew we were hosed, but there was still hope we would catch a window and land in Heathrow. We were a little late getting off the tarmac in Istanbul (but hey, it’s Istanbul).
Breakfast was a little “dodgy” (let’s switch to British now). That’s not complaining; it’s part of the story.
We did a holding pattern near Heathrow until the fuel situation got impractical, then we dog-legged up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and landed. Newcastle’s airport is pretty small, but there were several Emirates and BA 777 jumbo jets parked on the tarmac, doing what we did. The airport filled up with parked airplanes shortly thereafter.
We sat on the tarmac for six hours.
This was originally a trans-European flight to the hub, so that dodgy breakfast was the only food the crew had available. We were already coming in a bit late, so lunch came and went.
Here’s where the heroism started. First, the captain lobbied and got permission to let people leave the plane and terminate their trip at Newcastle. Checked baggage was a problem, so the captain offered to climb into the hold and extract baggage, a proposal eventually signed off by the security/customs people at the airport.
People were getting hungry. The captain informed us that catering was not much of a possibility, since the other jumbos would have cleaned them out by now, and planes normally carry round-trip provisions when heading to Newcastle because it’s so small.
The captain left the plane again and completely bought everything available in the shop at the airport. Incredible. He picked up around 100 sandwiches, little finger cake things they call flapjacks, trail mix, apples, chips, etc. We were randomly one of the last rows served, so they were out of sandwiches, but we still got a decent snack thanks to the captain taking time to care.
We had a few kids on board, who heroically didn’t cause a fuss the whole time.
The captain lobbied hard first for one of the coveted slots to land in Heathrow that afternoon (if there were any at all), then they tried to set up coaches for a convoy to London, but the roads to Heathrow might have been worse than the runways.
The crew requested an extension of every non-legal restriction on their service time, but we were up against a hard 9:30 PM legal stop-work for the crew. There were no available hotel rooms in Newcastle for us, so the captain announced we would fly to Leeds. This far north, the sun goes down around 4:15 PM or so, so this was a night flight. I can’t remember exactly the timings at this point, but we were in the 7:00 PM range when we took off, I think.
Short flight to Leeds, then more tarmac time to rally the ground troops. They lined up two nice coaches at arrivals (everyone including the Turks had to go through border control, including those without visas; not sure how that worked, maybe they had transit visas) and bussed us to this great hotel.
Dinner was served at 10:15 PM. Roasted turkey, roasted potatoes, vegetables, and gravy. They set up a little buffet in the airport lounge restaurant. We didn’t have our camera, but there was this great “WELCOME PASSENGERS OF CANCELED BA FLIGHT” sign outside. We got two complementary cokes, and I’m sure a lot of our fellow passengers went up to the 13th floor Sky Bar and helped them recover whatever cost they didn’t get back from BA.
We’re about to go down to breakfast now, which is also complementary. As of right now (a trademark phrase), we have a 2:00 PM flight to Heathrow according to the website. Unless we’re on another airplane later on, tonight might not be as good of a night. They are starting to cancel “new” outbound flights, including the “Sunday version” of our Houston flight yesterday scheduled on 2:20 PM. Maybe that’s to help clear the way to let some of these backlogged passengers out. BBC News is saying “few” flights will leave today, but I think that may be partly to manage people’s expectations.
BA’s transfer desk will help us find our new itinerary. Snow seems to be abating, and I trust they will do as right by us today as they have done so far.
Let me heartily recommend BA, post-strike, post-cloud, as a stellar, top-notch airline. I doubt we could find this kind of generosity from another airline.