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Published: March 20th 2008
Hello You!
What a lovely sight, am home.The flight seemed to go pretty smooth until 1 hour before landing the captain tells us that they are having some severe gales in England and that some planes this morning have been re-directed to Amsterdam - oh no!
The captain then tells us that we have to circle a while to wait for permisson from ground countrol to land and it may be quite bumpy, but fortunatley we only have to wait 20 minutes extra and the landing is no where near as bad as they were making out - I had scenes from 'Lost' going round in my head and everything!
We land, get transported over from Terminal 4 to terminal 1 and it's only here we find that our flight to Manchester has been cancelled - along with 25 other BA flights.
We are told we have to go through, collect our luggage then check in with the BA staff to see about re-booking a flight.
As we go through for our luggage it's absolute chaos (and not the good organised chaos kind like in Thailand - at least they knew what they were doing and the end result was right!). We had to wait 2 hours for our luggage to come off, some people were waiting longer and others had given up hope, meaning there were hundreds of bags just lying around uncollected.
We were told by the staff here that they heard there were buses to take people up to Manchester and other airports. As we were also told quite honestly by some of the staff here they thought it was unlikely that any of their flights would go today, plus there was a massive queue to re-book seats, so a bus was sounding pretty good to us!
However when we passed security and went to ask BA staff outside, no one knew anything about any buses - the communication was shocking.
They all wanted us to join a queue that would take at least 5 hours to get to the front to re-book a fllight - we just want a bus not a plane!
Therefore we ended up queing at the Customer Service desk instead as it was a lot shorter, but when we hadn't moved an inch in 45 mins Di went off to see if she could collar someone downstairs about the coaches before she blew her top.
Thankfully she managed to find the Coach Controller guy outside, apparently their were 140 coaches that had been hired to take people to different parts of the country, but as no one was asking him for them they were all sat in a carpark waiting! We said it's cos none of the staff know about them and we're sure if they told people the majority would opt for a coach rather than queing up in a line for 5 hours, rebooking onto a flight probably for tomorrow, going away and then having to come back tomorrow and doing it all again!
The guy called a coach for us, which turned out to be a big 50 seater. They told us we would have to wait for more people and we were so scared at one point that we wouldn't be able to go that we were willing to go upstairs and canvass for people ourselves!
But fortunatley, after only 20 mins waiting, the guy phoned his boss who said as they were getting paid regardless they could still take us. So after a quick change from the big 50 seater to a smaller Chrysler car in Oxford, me and Di got driven straight to Di's door with our own personnel chauffer Simon - excellent!
Di's lovely parents then gace me a much appreciated lift back to Wigan and then after a roast dinner that my lovely mother had cooked for my home coming it was off to my big double bed with teddy - ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
It's been the best time of my life, can't believe it's all over and now have to face reality and get a job!
Until the next time . . . .. . .
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