Airline passengers should always make two assumptions when boarding a flight. The first concerns baggage: if you check anything in, wave the case goodbye for the last time as it disappears along the conveyor belt. Assuming you will never see your luggage again sounds excessively pessimistic. Almost always your possessions will be returned to you – usually at the destination airport, sometimes days later when they turn up in a van. But the possibility that your precious stuff may be on a one-way journey to the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama, should inform your packing. Anything you cannot do without – for sentimental, medical or financial reasons – should stay with you in your cabin luggage.
The second assumption of misfortune is that your flight will be diverted. Touching down at the wrong airport can happen for all manner of reasons: running short of fuel, technical issues, offloading disruptive passengers…
I have no data to confirm it, but I sense that diversions are increasing. The story of the summer comprises storms across Europe and air traffic control restrictions.
August began with this combination causing widespread diversions of Gatwick-bound flights to a range of airports. In the early hours of Friday morning, a Tui flight from Paphos in Cyprus to London Gatwick landed surprisingly at Stansted. As always with a diversion, passengers who did not have cars parked at Gatwick were at an advantage – worth bearing in mind when you are considering how to reach your departure airport.
At around the same time, easyJet passengers from Hurghada to Gatwick were waiting around in a near-deserted terminal at Milan Malpensa – or Silvio Berlusconi International Airport, as we must now call it.
Italy had not featured in the passengers’ plans. But Gatwick-Hurghada is a round-trip of around 5,000 miles. The pilots and cabin crew are able legally to operate the return journey with a planned time of around 12 hours between leaving Gatwick and returning to the Sussex airport. But even mild disruption – in this case air traffic control slot delays – means the journey cannot be completed within the crew’s maximum permitted hours. The long-established workaround is for a replacement crew to be positioned to pick up the flight at Milan. The same applies for links such as Sharm el Sheikh to Manchester. Such long…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at The Independent Travel…