Originally Posted by
Gold77
Look at tonight's [3 Aug] BA782. Scheduled departure 17:00, estimated departure 18:27, and my app says "We're very sorry this flight has been delayed because of a late arriving aircraft".
OK, so where is this inbound aircraft? It is BA547, arriving from Fiumicino. It indeed landed 42 minutes late. Problem, its scheduled arrival time was 16:55, so it cannot have been the aircraft that was originally intended to fly as BA782.
It could well be that the original aircraft was even more delayed, in which case the reason would be correct. But I cannot help wondering whether BA in fact covers its poor planning or lack of serviceable aircraft by the "late inbound" excuse (which in turn can be blamed on external factors such as weather or ATC, and is more acceptable by passengers)...
Gold77, aircraft changes are pretty much the norm, not the exception, especially for SH and especially during the summer when you have CB activity, or congestion, or high wind (got all 3 yesterday). A good few years ago I was voluntold to escort some comms guy to take photos of G-EUOE after its repairs. We tracked it for one hour whilst it came it into LHR, and in that hour it changed the arrival stand twice and its next leg three times. Chances are that -UXI wasn't your original plane.
Anyhow, the delay yesterday was a mixture of rotational, turnround delay (basically the plane was late and therefore the turnround couldn't take any less time than it took) plus a HAL system problem. Those were the delay codes. The app will give you either the longest delay or the delay that caused the others, such as the inbound delay in this case.
Hope this helps.