Originally Posted by
ffay005
Without knowing what actually happened at BER I cannot claim one way or the other, but AY buys ground handling services from some company, probably the cheapest one. If that company is unprepared to deice aircraft within a reasonable timeframe and if AY plans their schedules without allowing time for this, in a destination where the average temperature is 0.7 °C, then it very much sounds like a (bad?) commercial decision to me, made by AY, and is not really related to severe or abnormal weather or to BER airport being badly managed.
And while this kind of drama does well on Flyertalk, if you sent it to AY you'd get a simple response saying there's only one deicing company, the snowfall was unexpected within that day and other flights were delayed departing that morning (which it seems was the case). The appropriate response would then be to look at the delays of those other flights and notice that they're typically 20 mins or less instead of the 1 hour AY had and said that with a 20 min delay the connection was doable. AMS regularly delays flights because of wind despite everyone knowing it is windy in AMS, everyone knows when typhoon season is in Asia but flights are still cancelled etc. so I'm not sure if your average temperature argument would work either.
The best way to show that an airline could have avoided the delay is to show that others did and that it wasn't mechanical.
On the compensation side, afaik EC261 does not cover ANY expenses on arrival other than those incurred finishing the trip because of the delay (e.g. taxi if arriving after public transport ends), so the 100e might be part of that but it might be a battle to get it.
Anyway, let's see how it goes on the claim. Who knows, they might just grant it or parts of it without any questions asked. It's probably one worth fighting for at least.