On the subject of flying...

A few short notes from the holiday log ...


On the subject of flying

My eldest daughter flew out seperately from us, she wasn't going to come with us at all then changed her mind at the last minute and we couldn't get her on our flight.

So she was stood in the check-in line at Leeds/Bradford airport on the saturday night and a family were weighing in their luggage when the check-in girl asked them the usual questions about have they packed the case themsleves, are they carrying items for other people etc etc - those questions where you keep a straight face and only answer yes or no - and the bloke of the family blurts out "theres a bomb in that suitcase, ha, ha"

Mandy said he was not a young kid but a middle aged man with his wife and two small children with him and you can only think that that he must have had some sort of radical brain surgery where the surgeons had removed all of the part of the brain that makes you function as a person and only left behind the bit that allowed him to breath and walk.

He was asked to repeat his comment and the fekkwit repeated it at which point two police officers appeared as if from nowhere and arrested him and carted him and his young family off somewhere else.

Can you imagine what those kids think of their dad now and for the rest of their lives ?

They'd probably been looking forward to their family holiday for a long time, saving up, buying new clothes, getting all excited packing their suitcases, and then their idiot dad gets arrested and they can't fly with that airline ever again for the rest of their lives and will probably struggle to book with anyone else too.

The capability of some people to self destruct in a brain fart of fekkwittedness never ceases to amaze me.
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And then on the following saturday Mandy was flying back from Mahon to Leeds and so we took her to the airport for her late night flight (the late ones are the cheapest) and waited in line at the check-in desk for her.

As we suspected the flight seemed to be sparsly populated, there were only about twenty people in the queue in front of us. With it being a last minute (literally) booking we had booked her on a Jet2.com service - Jet2.com are a rapidly developing budget no frills airline that operate out of Leeds and Manchester with a small fleet of 737's and one 757, when you look at their schedules their aircraft are like albatrosses - they are in the air for 98% of their working life, 30 minute turnarounds, turn up at the airport, walk on and go.

Its a very popular way of travelling from the UK now, operators like this have become air taxis and with flights sometimes available for just five pence (like the one I booked to France last March), its obvious why they are so popular.

There is a downside though.

The operator has absolutely no responsibility to carry you at all.

If you turn up with the confirmation email and your passport at least 40 minutes before your flight then you'll get on it but if for any reason they have overbooked or they cannot provide an aircraft at that time then all they'll do is give you your money back, no compensation, no overnights in a hotel and no guarantee that they'll put you onto another flight, you certainly have no priority for rebooking another flight.

Its like missing a bus - you wait for the next one but theres no guarantee that you'll get on the next bus either and the bus company won't want to know about your complaint.

So we are standing in line and telling Mandy that the plane should be nice and empty and that she'll have a spare seat to spread out on when we turn around and suddenly another 100 or so people have joined the queue.

They were all from Liverpool and should have been flying out on an Easyjet (another budget airline) flight ten minutes before Mandy, but it had been cancelled.

Thats all, just cancelled, no explanation, the airport had no representation for Easyjet and as far as they knew the aircraft had just not turned up from Liverpool on the outward leg and would not be turning up. Easyjet were not sending another aircraft and had simply cancelled the return leg, leaving 100 scousers stuck in Mahon to find their own way home.

It was 11pm and the last flight back to the UK that night was the Jet2 flight to Leeds which fortunately had plenty of capacity on it, so the 100 or so unhappy Liverpudlians had to troop over to a ticket shop and purchase seats on the Leeds flight - they couldn't transfer their Easyjet tickets to the Leeds flight and were told to claim their money back from Easyjet when they got home - a scouse family in the queue right behind us had five members and had to fork out nearly £1000 for the trip back to Leeds which was a lot more than they had originally paid Easyjet.

Then of course there was the problem that they'd be arriving in Leeds instead of Liverpool, at 1am in the morning. The woman in the group behind us asked me if Leeds was as close to Liverpool as Manchester was as they often took taxis from Manchester to Liverpool. I tried not to laugh at their predicament and gently told her that yes, Leeds was a lot further from Liverpool than Manchester was and she'd struggle to get a taxi driver to take her there at 1am in the morning for anything less than a kings ransom.

So there you have it - you'll save a stack of money with a budget airline provided that they don't have a "technical problem" and cancel your flight, if they do, it starts to get expensive for you.