Originally Posted by
megaloman
Quite frankly - if I was flying to Athens last night, I would much preffer to sit in the lounge or inside the terminal, where I had unrestricted access to drinks and snacks and board when the ATC was sure we would be allowed to take off in next 30-40 minutes. Even if that meant longer delay. My partner spent almost 6 hours trapped on the plane - other people spend 4-6 hours on the ground - I've seen BA11 delayed even more.
It's entirely understandable that most people feel that way but there are pretty good operational reasons for 'containing' passengers on the plane, among others:
- As has been outlined it's difficult to predict what the delay will be at any given point from the ATC perspective and I suspect every change in that and the outbound routes which were/weren't closed meant a recalculation by the airline around crew hours and such. The end result is the delay may change at short notice and they want to be in a position to get the flight out quickly if that happens. Unfortunately (though perhaps unsurprisingly) a minority of passengers, if not on the plane, will be nowhere to be found after a couple of hours when they call for immediate boarding and they seem to invariably be the passengers with checked bags...slots get missed etc.
- In a number of cases, I suspect they've boarded the plane and taxied to some corner of Heathrow to free up the stand for inbound arrivals, certainly I've been through that a few times.
If you take BA's mission for the day as getting as many people as possible to their destination with as little delay as possible (and it is, because they won't to pay costs incurred in overnights stays etc unnecessarily), then it makes sense to board people as soon as the aircraft is available and looks likely to depart within a couple of hours at least. Lack of drinks provision etc isn't ideal and is, I'd guess primarily a short haul problem (certainly, in similar situations on long haul I've been offered drinks) where there just isn't enough loaded to allow everybody on the plane a glass of water and the logistics of arranging that for dozens of flights at short notice isn't practical or seen as worthwhile, at the end of the day people will survive for a few hours even if it's not necessarily pleasant.