Originally Posted by
corporate-wage-slave
Depends on context. If it's on board a service which is flying (and therefore leads to a diversion) then that's extraordinary. If a flight is delayed due to a crew not turning up for a flight in LHR or LGW then probably not - unless there is an outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the London Borough of Hillingdon, in which case all bets are off. Several court judgements have indicated that a commonsense use of the word extraordinary can be applied.
Originally Posted by
UKtravelbear
To a degree it depends on the expectation - and how reasonable that expectation is - that an airline will have spare crew hanging about at every outstation or how easy it is to get one to an airport from another one and to a degree that depends on the airports involved.
As c-w-s says at LHR and LGW you can more than reasonably expect BA to have crew either there on standby or within a short distance away on call but they are main bases. Personally I'd say the same for JFK where BA has several flights a day but I know others might disagree with me on that.
Thank you both. This week I was scheduled to fly from an outstation (outside the EU but an airport BA serves more than once a day). We were notified at check-in of a circa 45 minute delay apparently due to weather impacting the inbound's departure from LHR. At the gate, a few minutes after the original departure time but before the revised, we were told the flight had been cancelled due to an I'll FO. It was BA's last departure of the day. We were re-scheduled 24 hours later.
I'd be an interested in people's thoughts on whether or not this is due EU261. We've all been given transportation, food and overnight accommodation which on the face of it is great (although the ground handling was appalling). On the flipside, was it really illness or is BA just saying that because it can?