The only people who really enjoy air travel are probably the people who don’t really do any air travel.
- Take off your shoes
- Get rid of your softdrink,
- Small hand-baggage only – oops no space for even that.
- No leg room
Travel used to be better than that but even before September 11, airlines were taking extra special care of their customers.
My favorite was a small Irish airline that used to fly out of Frankfurt-Hahn that flew to Stansted airport. It was the last flight of the day which should have left about eight pm and arrive in Stansted about 10:00 pm. I guess that the airline didn’t really want to depress the people waiting in Stansted. They simply reported that the flight was on-time, up until the time that it should have landed. It was at this point that they mentioned that it might be delayed but didn’t even mention that it had yet to take off.
First a bit of geography. The Stansted airport is outside of London, so unless you have a car you really don’t want to get stuck there. A typical cab ride would be about sixty pounds or one hundred dollars to get you back to London. Eventually the plane took off and while I was waiting I did the math on the arrival. It looked like it would be a close call between when the flight would land and when the last train of the evening would leave.
I read some of my book and silently cursed the airline, but hey if we miss the train I am sure that the airline will help out. After all, we are in the middle of nowhere. Well, to make a long story short, the passengers and their luggage arrived about 30 minutes after the last train.
I don’t know how often this type of problem occurred but apparently it was not so infrequent. I went to speak with one of their representatives to be told that no, they don’t actually provide any transport (ie a bus) into the city, that is something that each person would have to sort out on their own.
Well, I can only say that I was extremely lucky. One of the other people waiting to pick up his girlfriend used to work for a travel company and so he took the matter into his own hands. He went outside and spoke with one of the bus drivers to see if their company could come back, pick us all up and drop us off at a couple of train stations in the city. The driver checked with his boss and indeed that was ok, but he had to first pickup a load of people and drop them off and come back.
My girlfriend had arrived and she would be staying with me for a while and so I was happy, but I was quite surprised to hear one of her comments from the flight. It seems that the airline staff were selling train tickets on the plane, and a few people were asking if it would still be running. The staff apparently without even a pause said that the train would wait for them.
The bus driver did eventually come back and we boarded the bus at about two in the morning. The bus was full, the cost was actually a very reasonable five pounds per person. It was a very long night, and we did arrive at liverpool street station about 4:30 in the morning. It was so early that there were no cabs at the cab stand.
Depending on your view there were two different lessons to be learned from this trip. The first being if the airline is using a single plane between two different destinations the delays are cumulative and you will be late, unless you take the first flight of the day. The second lesson was that this particular airline was not very concerned if they stranded their customers and should really be avoided.