maleficent

For work, I keep a timer file of how my work hours are spent. For grins and chuckles and acid indigestion, we started tracking how much time was spent in transit to customer sites and we came up with a separate category for specifically tracking flight delays. In 2004, the figure I came up with was more than 2 weeks (I week being 40 hours) worth of time (I think it was over 90 hours) were wasted waiting out flight delays. That's a lot of time..

I would love to see something in the way of compensation for flight delays, the closest I've come to it, was on an American Airlines flight that took off, had some sort of engine trouble about 100 miles into the flight, and the pilot opted to turn around and go back to Newark. We landed safely, it was the right decision, and American credited me with 10,000 miles.

I've been on another AA flight, that wasn't allowed to take off because (and I know nothing of airline mechanics) some back up whatchamacallit that is used for landing gear only in the event that the primary and secondary equipment fails didn't work. The plane wasn't allowed to fly. Engine failure should be enough to turn a plane around.

For an airline to know on take off that they have a problem, and for that problem to be ignored, then that problem gets compounded because they can't reach cruising altitude and almost run out of fuel, all because they didn't want to inconvenience people? It'd be a bigger inconvenience if that plane went down. The lawsuits would cost a bit more than 100,000 pounds. Now, I'm also sure that BA got charged for landing at Manchester instead of Heathrow, so they the money they saved they lost somewhere else.

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