Originally Posted by
TabTraveller
There are very many criticisms that one could level at BA currently but the lack of professionalism of their flight crew is not amongst them. Weather by its very nature is transient and changeable. Airlines and aircraft have different safety procedures and tolerances. It is simply not up to passengers (or CEDR frankly) to opine as to whether the flight crew made the correct decision to divert, irrespective of whether other flights landed around that time.
To give a slightly different perspective and go slightly OT, I had on a ‘weather’ delay on JetBlue (B6) from BOS to ACK (Nantucket). Had a lovely flight to BOS on BA and then had a longish connection time before the B6 flight at 18:30 down to ACK. Well as we approached 18:00 there were a couple of flights that were announced as using different aircraft than planned owing to late incoming flights and therefore different gates. Then I get an update from the island that it is forecast to start to get misty and then Foggy, so arriving earlier will be better.
Then we’re announced as being delayed with no explanation as to why and there isn’t a plane at our gate. Then we kept being delayed further before an aircraft finally arrived at our gate.Two hours later I hear from ACK that the airport is closed just as the pilot is giving the news to the girl manning the gate desk. B6 automatically rebooked me on a flight at 6am via JFK which I politely declined and asked for the same flight the next day, as I had been awake for nearly 24hrs at this point. They also were not willing to pay for a hotel because it was a weather related delay. To add insult to injury the Hilton was full but they found me a room elsewhere.
When I went back next day to the airport I went to the B6 desks and spoke to a girl who immediately passed me on to a manager. I pointed out that when we were supposed to have left BOS at that point ACK was open and there wasn’t any fog or mist. Further to that flights were landing for a long while after that until the airport closed due to fog. I had flight tracking data to back that up and at this point the manager said the late incoming flight was delayed due to weather. That was the weather reason for denying me a hotel room they said.
I pointed out that looking at the data they’d managed to shuffle aircraft to get all the other delayed incoming aircraft flights out with only minor delays or on time that night. It appeared that they had picked on ACK because it was a bucket and spade route and prioritised other routes instead. At this point the manager said that she agreed with me and apologised. She said whilst she couldn’t refund me in cash for the hotel, she could credit my travel bank. I agreed to that and produced the hotel bill which she rounded up to the next $50. I then had $250 to spend on future B6 flights.
Never had that on BA.