bigmacbear | England Trip. Part I

Wednesday, August 13
We began the day about 3 AM getting packed and off to the airport for the 6:15 AM flight to JFK. For some reason my bag triggered the bomb-sniffer and they had to paw through it; fortunately they found nothing suspicious, but I suspect it was a recent boot repair with Shoe Goo that set it off. On arrival at JFK we had planned to stash our bags in a luggage-storage facility in Terminal 4, but the people working there were giving conflicting directions (one sending us to the other who sent us right back to the first). Thanks a lot, guys.

We ended up schlepping the bags with us as we went to visit

gmjambear's mother and stepfather in Amityville via the Long Island Railroad. We spent a couple hours chatting first with Gary's mother and stepfather and later visited his stepfather's parents at their home elsewhere in town. After lunch at a local diner, it was time to get back on the train to check in for the flight to Manchester.

On arrival at JFK Terminal 7, we checked in for our flight and found that the Manchester flight the previous day had been canceled due to mechanical failures. Our plane was being delayed as well, and the incoming flight from Manchester was late by about six hours, due to arrive when we would have taken off on the original schedule. As it turned out, we ended up using the aircraft that finally came in from Manchester instead of the broken plane we were scheduled on, so we were only an hour and a half late leaving JFK.

The last time we'd had problems with airline delays and cancellations was on our return trip with the Rochester Gay Men's Chorus from San Jose to Rochester. That occurred during the United Airlines meltdown in the summer of 2000, and I couldn't help but compare the two incidents.

United, 2000	British Airways, 2003
Delayed 23 hours on 2 segments	Delayed 1.5 hours on one segment
No spare planes, crews, or anything	Found a spare plane in London (which is why the arriving plane was so late coming in from Manchester, but at least it wasn't canceled)
Could not give us a straight answer on the expected delay; kept stringing us along hour by hour until it was too late to fly	Told us we would leave at 7:30 PM and we actually left fairly close to 7:30
Pissed-off and enraged customers	Inconvenienced but not-too-annoyed customers

In short, BA got right practically everything United got so horribly wrong back in 2000.