Flight BA 287: I knew this was the wrong day to quit sniffing glue

I can't remember if it was the part where they announced there was a "problem with the hydraulics", or the bit where they said "and the navigation system is playing up too", or even if it was the moment of absurdity where the stewardess was running around saying "Don't panic" despite having covered herself in chicken sauce and shaking the service trays all over the place, but I think the real moment of "So, we're going to die" came along when they started jettisoning 10+ hours worth of fuel into the Ocean as we turned around to make an emergency landing in Ireland:



That's the fuel being splattered all over the sky, in an attempt to make the plane less explodey should it hit the ground.

Here come the fire engines, complete with little firemen guys running back and forth and looking worried:


Apparently the emergency services had been fully prepared for total carnage, so that's nice.




As you might have guessed, my flight to California did not run smoothly.

In fact, at every stage of the journey, something stupid happened. As soon as we hit Terminal 5 at Heathrow, everything went wrong. It looked like something out of 28 Days Later, with people randomly running around yelling and guys in yellow suits telling us all to remain calm.

I won't dwell on the utter lack of food to eat at T5 (unless you like really expensive sushi or Oysters), the waste bins with holes too small to put anything in them properly or the fact that nobody knew where any of the planes were landing. Instead, here's a photo of the departures / arrivals board (Click to enlarge if you can't read it):


.....yeah, says it all. The plane was delayed from taking off for two and a half hours because "We want to make sure your luggage is packed safely".

It wasn't.

We made the emergency landing in Ireland, didn't die horribly and (after sitting on the plane for another two hours or so on the runway) reached the carousel, only to find out that roughly half the 350 or so passengers (myself included) were missing their bags - despite being delayed from taking off for two hours in the first place, so they could "pack it all". Doh.

British Airways don't have any sort of official station at Shannon Airport, so there was nobody to talk to, no-one to ask for help and the airplane staff raced off for their hotel leaving us all to file onto random coaches they'd arranged for us. One cabin crew guy refused to let a rather distressed lady use his mobile to make a call because "It's my personal phone and I'm not letting people use it".

Gotta love that professionalism and care for the people they're entrusted with, right?

On the off-chance you DID get through to the BA Customer Service line, they would randomly hang up on people after listening to them for a few minutes. They kept telling one guy (whose skiing equipment for a family holiday had all gone AWOL) he could "change his dates", which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Change his DATES?? We're stranded in Ireland and making inquiries about missing luggage. What does "changing dates" have to do with anything?

Imagine our dismay when our coach broke down twice en-route to one of the hotels. It got worse when we discovered piles of people stranded outside overbooked hotels, who then started demanding to get on our coach too. The driver just wanted to dump us all in the street which was nice of him. Eventually we got to a hotel that had rooms available and ate dinner at, er, 11:30PM and were back at Shannon airport the next morning for 8AM or thereabouts. From there it just got worse, as we found out Shannon airport had no direct feed to the BA computer systems and so had to check us onto the plane manually or something (in other words, we had to stand round for a bunch more hours praying for death).



Oh, and if we wanted to try to get to California again, we had to get back on the plane that we thought was going to do a nosedive the day before (they don't have any spare jumbo jets at Shannon Airport, funnily enough). The look on this girls face pretty much summed up our reaction to this wonderful news:


Yeah, she ain't impressed (you can see some of the other passengers looking over at the plane sitting on the airstrip still being fiddled with. They probably weren't that impressed either).

We finally got on the plane, only to be told all the food had gone bad from the day before (not that we got to eat any of it), so they had to get some catering firm to come up with a ton of "pretend" airplane food and wait for them to deliver it.

Meanwhile, a plane came into land and its tire burst, causing a further delay as they scraped the junk off the runway. Oh, and people working at the terminal were claiming George Bush randomly decided to turn up in Airforce One, which seemingly led to more delays (whether he actually appeared or not, I have no clue).

Eventually we took off, which meant ten more hours of sitting round on the plane waiting for something else to go wrong, and sure enough, it did - though we didn't have anymore plane related scares, we arrived at the Homeland Security Desks only to be told that "our computer systems are malfunctioning". The whole time I have been traveling to America, I have NEVER seen the TSA systems acting up. I briefly considered just asking one of them to shoot me in the head at this point, or at least work me over a bit just to make me feel better. And we still had to stand around shouting at BA Employees afterwards, who were ever so generous in offering passengers with no bags up to $50 compensation.



So here I am, minus luggage and thoroughly sick of aeroplanes. I'm also faintly disturbed that the first reaction I had to what looked like impending doom was "Wow, this'll make a great blog and where's the camera" closely followed by "Crap, I'm missing an EBay auction I was watching".

Can't win em all. There was some coverage of the plane fiasco on Irish news and a few other stations, and it got a little bit of mileage - ahaha - here. The thing that caused all the problems was a computer card in charge of displaying fluid levels or something, though I doubt BA will ever actually reveal how close we came to a big ole heap of instant death. I did get to meet Rob Newby, which was good fun.

Pity about the rest of the trip so far though. On the bright side, I wasn't left standing here all night:


....so everything is now officially coming up Millhouse.

I think.