Butts

What is it with Flights to Edinburgh being delayed from LHR? or am I just unlucky ?

Coming in from Luxembourg almost on time I had a few hours to kill prior to the BA1454 scheduled to leave at 1815. I checked Flyer Expert and it said that the plane was on it's way from Athens albeit running around 20 late which should have enabled it to depart for Edinburgh on time as it was arriving around 1630. I decided to don a patch and use the facilities within. Lo and behold I got in only to find the EDI Flight was now going to be a late running Paris Service. Not the Athens one.

It didn't leave until 1942 and we were sitting at the gate waiting for 2 standby passengers who turned out to be BA Staff - there were several subsequent EDI Flights.

There were only 4 Rows of CE and the head honcho had 2 staff helping him with this onerous workload with the other two being left to handle ET. Despite the delay and lack of CE passengers neither he nor his minions found the time to do any Gold Greetings outwith the inner sanctum.

We eventually arrived at 2104 and they were crowing about how we were only an hour and twenty minutes late ?

There needs to be a crackdown on this callous attitude to timekeeping with some form of compensation for any service over an hour late or they are going to keep taking the p*ss on a regular basis. If you get your money back when a train is this late whoever is responsible there should be some form of payment to Air Travellers in similar circumstances.

Even a �20 Tesco Voucher (other supermarkets are available) would be welcome and better than nothing.

krispy84

I can�t say any of the above sounds like a shambles.

Butts

How would you describe it then?

A normal occurrence between LHR and EDI !!

Stormbel

You are writing this as if the the world had caved in.
Does the lack of a Gold Greeting distress you? Is it something in the rules?

Geordie405

I'm not overly bothered about the lack of a Gold greeting but I would be exceptionally frustrated with the delay. The "crowing" as the OP puts it only serves to add insult to injury. In this instance the delay was as long as the flight should have been - 1815 departure for a 1940 arrival. BA shows the departure as 1942 and arrival at 2104. Obviously there are already regulations covering delays but given that the delay has to be at least 3 hours it does result in a marked difference between air travel and the Delay Repay schemes for rail travel. For example, LNER delay repay kicks in at 30 minutes and it's a 50% refund. Obviously there's no reason why the OP can't complain to BA and ask for a service recovery gesture but BA could simply say no, and state the delay falls outside the scope of the regulation and that would presumably be that. I think that there really does need to be a better emphasis on timekeeping, especially for domestic UK flights where there's an argument that (for some destinations anyway) you're competing against the railway for business. Given the layover and then the delay it would probably have been just as quick for the OP to head into London and take the train from KGX - if today wasn't another strike day of course!

Butts

Perhaps they need point to point domestic services at least within the confines of the UK rather than involving convoluted trans European schedules for one Aircraft that inevitably end up being delayed.

Butts

As Geordie 405 says the delay is the pre-eminent annoyance - the impression given is it's quite acceptable to be over an hour late without the worry of any recompense being involved.

13901

There's a bit to unpack here. I don't want to sound flippant to the OP, who in my opinion is right to feel aggrieved about the delays, so I hope he won't mind if I file the lack of Gold greetings on a 50min flight, the "crowing" about the delay, the bit around the staff travellers or the "callous attitude"/"taking the p*ss" to the 'unimportant' folder.

The key point for me is this:

Unfortunately, OP, this idea not only is restrictive, limits aircraft utilisation, and ultimately causes costs to increases (costs that inevitably get passed on to the customer); it actually won't solve the problem of rotational delays. The simple truth is that UK Domestic departures are affected by air traffic congestion, passenger boarding delays, technical difficulties and weather as much (often more) than European flights. There've been plenty of instances where I sat in T5 waiting for a flight to, say, Belgium, where I commuted on a weekly basis, and my inbound was one hour late out of Glasgow due to weather there, or fog in Jersey.

I'd also like to challenge the assertion you make on 'convoluted, trans-European schedules'. They aren't. BA's operation ex-LHR is exactly point-to-point. Take, for instance, today's roster (as of the time of typing) for G-EUUB: first out to MAN as BA1382 (taxiing at this very moment); back as BA1387. Then off to NAP as BA536, back as BA537. Then off to LIN as BA570, where it'll night stop. Tomorrow, early return from LIN as BA561, off to GLA as BA1476, back from there as BA1483 and then it seems to be positioning there again for a spot of maintenance in the hangar. This is but one plane, and all the others you see in the fleet do the exact same back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. The only difference is that sometimes they go in the UK, sometimes they go elsewhere. This is fairly straightforward, unlike - say - other airlines such as Ryanair where they balance their fleet across multiple bases by bouncing aircraft between them on a triangular (or W) pattern. That's very efficient, and a necessity if you have multiple bases, but can also be a very big risk as Norwegian found when they tried to apply it to longhaul operation.

BA will also switch planes and routes based on multiple factors, including trying to minimise the overall delays on the network, work that needs doing on the planes, particular technical requirements and so on. I've seen my flight switch from A320 to A320 because of different factors: inbound delays, for instance; or the fact that the inbound developed a technical fault en route which needed fixing before the plane could depart to another destination; or, in one interesting case when going out to LIS, there were ATC strikes in France and they opted to take a route further out into the ocean, but one which required a particular kind of satcomm which my original plane didn't have, so another one had to "do the needful".

corporate-wage-slave

As a delayed flight which was inconvenient. And yes I certainly would like BA (and other airlines) to improve timekeeping, which after about 15:00 hrs tends to get pretty bad at LHR and similar airports.

SxMan

Sadly, we appear to have become conditioned to failing service such that it is now not merely accepted, but taken as the new norm. 😬🙈

SxMan

how about a shuttle service 👌😜

13901

You mean like the entirety of BA's short haul network today?

Butts

I still maintain the belief that once it goes over an hour BA and other airlines should "be in the chair" for some sort of recompense as happens with Rail journeys.

It should be noted this is payable whoever / whatever ir responsible for the delay..

Whether such a measure would reduce the frequency of such events is questionable but morally the right thing to do..

bisonrav

An unconditional delay repay on short haul flights would put fares through the roof. It's a minor inconvenience, not the end of the world.

crazy8534

All I will say Butts is be thankful it wasn’t a bus gate at EDI too, where they will wait until both buses are completely full and the plane is totally empty before they drive away to take you 400yds to the drop off point which is then a mere half mile (OK slight exaggeration) walk away through the terminal from the exit!