So lets look at some facts, shall we?

From looking at the schedules, American fly from Orlando to:

Chicago (5x)

Miami (7x)

Charlotte (9x)

Dallas Fort Worth (8x)

Philadelphia (5x)

New York JFK (2x)

Phoenix (2x)

You’re not telling me that perhaps half of the passengers couldn’t have been re-accommodated on those services?

Plus there’s Delta and United. Plus there’s Virgin and Lufthansa.

So let’s say roughly half the passengers could have got home the next morning (via a connection).

The aircraft would still have diverted. There would have been fewer hotel rooms to find as half the passengers would already be on their way.

There would have been fewer passengers to put on the day flight or alternative services from NYC. Perhaps some could have been put on a bus to Newark on alternative BA or United services?

The point is none of that happened. BA did what was right for them to keep costs low and screwed the passengers over. They deserve all the negative publicity.

The LGW-MCO carrying parts and engineer the following day got diverted en route due to weather, hence the further delay to the rescheduled flight

So really was a case of "if it can go wrong it will!"

I wonder why JFK was chosen if there were no hotels available, I would have thought this would have been a factor in the decision.

I was on a Virgin flight from JFK to LHR during the big Xmas snow (2010?) and initially we were unsure where we would be going whilst Ops secured us a hotel though we did manage to get into Stansted in the end

hindsight is a wonderful thing! After the first attempt it would have been too late to reroute anyone and the rescheduled direct flight would still have been the quickest way to get everyone home rather than start rerouting people indirectly to the wrong London airport

BA - "There's a lounge over there with free food, drink and bedding for you to get some rest".

Passengers - "Nah mate, we'll stay here on the floor".

Yes, sounds entirely plausible.

LOL, even if, how many flights via ORD/PHL/MIA etc etc depart-ed after 20.30 had available seats and beside all this fantasising the problem was no longer the original sorted delay in Orlando but the subsequent disruption the second (recurrent) tech problem and diversion to JFK very early in the morning with very few available flights to rebook and very few if any available hotel rooms due to the NY marathon.

I think that folks who don't do a lot of domestic flights in the USA underestimate the complexity on the native hub and spoke system there. And consequently how good the Big Four carriers there have had to become in clearing delayed flights and delayed passengers and returning things to normal when there's a ground stop at a hub for a couple hours. This is one area where BA could learn from AA, which had to figure it out from the point when they decided that, hey, it makes sense for other reasons to put a hub in blizzard-prone Chicago.

As one of those Yankees who has been offered a fair number of rather creative rebookings (Sorry, but is there a better option to get from Florida to Scotland by way of San Francisco? Can we try that again?) from the local GAs, I also found myself wondering why BA was seeming to drag so much with offering other options when the East Coast hubs all have their share of later transatlantic red eye options. No, an unplanned transit of CDG or Madrid in order to get back home is not the ideal way to finish a trip, but at least you're getting yourself back onto the correct continent and that's a good first big step.

And yes, auto-rebooking and rebooking by phone app is an IT investment up front, but once you do it, you can probably reduce staffing costs and callback times and free up employee time for those cases where a ticket or situation is too complex to be handled by the phone app. There will always be issues when an airline is in ground stop recovery mode, but for everyday IRROPS when there is seat inventory available, the more people who can rebook online without assistance, the better it is for both passenger and company.

You've checked that there was availability for all passengers in all those flights in oder to make that statement, obviously? Or...

Its all very well saying BA should have booked the passengers on other services, but which ones are they? The schedule departure was 21:20. After the tech problem had been Identified and the passengers offloaded it would be 22:20 at the earliest. What flights are there from MCO-LON after that? So sending the pax via DFW, ORD etc BA could not get the pax there in time for the trans atlantic flights that night. BA assumed the aircraft would be fixed next day, so much easier to put the pax in hotels and send them next evening. Of course it all went wrong after that, but at the time it was not forseen.

I quite agree that BA should put pax on other carriers when a tech problem causes a flight cancellation, but that can only be done if there are other flights available. The problem with late night departures from the USA is there are very few daytime flights to Europe to transfer the pax to.. And that late at night there are not many domestics to other hubs either. None of this excuses the disgraceful behaviour of BA in ignoring their EU261 obligations when the second tech issue arose and the aircraft diverted to JFK.

A story in The Sun shows various letters which were given to passengers - all offer apologies for the delay and inconvenience, not one mentions EU261. I think that shows BA in its true colours.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/765455...hday-on-plane/

Because apart from 1 those flights all depart in the evening, not 0400. More likely the reason was spare B777 crews in JFK.

According to Avherald it was a high-temp warning on the gear, the crew descended to FL200 and deployed the gear to try and cool them off.