Currently stuck at an airport in london. It's insane how little information the staff here has.
Also mindboggling that in aviation, where everything has a backup or two there seems to be a single company with a single software that can take down an entire airspace which most like will create worldwide ripple for the next days.
For anyone stranded, read up on UK261/EU261 and your airlines application process to be reimbursed. As far as I’m aware it’s not likely to happen automatically, you need to initiate the process (and record audio/video just in case proof is needed)
Yeah but I don't think it's that legislation you'd rely on: you paid for a service they didn't deliver.
Compensation yeah, only applies if the reason for the delay/cancellation was under the airline's control. Nats down is pretty clearly a reason to reject compensation claims.
Eh, I tried in 2017 with BA when their system went down and received nothing. There was magically a Black Lives Matter protest at Gatwick (or maybe LCY, can’t remember) on the same day, which isn’t covered apparently.
Almost certainly not. The legislation says: "An operating air carrier shall not be obliged to pay compensation [...], if it can prove that the cancellation is caused by extraordinary circumstances which could not have been avoided even if all reasonable measures had been taken."
That gets them off the hook for even second order effects. No harm throwing in a claim though, there's no penalty for having a claim turned down.
Just had to cancel my 10-year passport renewal appointment for tomorrow morning, since it's in London and I'm in the EU. Man, this was a *miserable* way to spend a day. The flight kept getting bumped, heading for certain cancellation (it came, about midnight, long after I had returned from the airport); GPT was incredibly helpful on how to redeem (most of) the shit-ton of money I had paid for a 4-hour passport renewal appointment, and what my rights and obligations were in this situation.
In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport. So when the next update said that the flight had been bumped 9 hours, I had all I needed to secure that and went home. Two hours later, the app announced the flight was cancelled.
Sometimes (really a lot) I want to kick GPT's/Claude's/Gemini's collective rear ends. And then there are times like these, when, with me in a funk, AI cuts straight through to the essential knowledge I need and lowers the temperature.
> In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport.
What jurisdiction? EU? (I would love for that to be true in the US, but I bet it isn't...)
I just did a Google search[1] and here's what I found:
- US airlines do not pay cash for delays
- You’re entitled to a full refund for a significant delay if you choose not to travel
- Full refunds are paid within 7 business days for cards (20 calendar days for other payment methods)
- Paid extras (baggage, upgrades) are refundable if you didn’t receive them
- Airline policy dictates reimbursement for meals, hotels, and other expenses after a delay
"A refund for significant delays or changes to your flight: You are entitled to an automatic full cash refund (including taxes and fees) if your flight is "significantly changed" for any reason, and you turn down a rebooking offered by the airline. Airlines might push you to accept vouchers and travel credits, but you are entitled to a cash refund. If you do not want a voucher, just tell the airline you prefer to be refunded in cash."
- Delays your departure or arrival by 3 hours for domestic flights and 6 hours for international ones,
- Changes to your departure or arrival airports,
- Increases the number of connections
- Downgrades your class of service
- Changes your flight to different airports or aircraft that are less accessible for persons with disabilities."
There's really very little you can do bar booking an alternative flight at great expense. If you're lucky and you know the delay in advance, at least you may have a chance to take the Elizabeth Line into town and go for a stroll. I'd count a fat hour to go from the terminal to, say, Paddington. It's a pretty area and there are excellent Persian restaurants around.
I’m way more often than not on the side of refactoring but there’s risks on both ends with a mission-critical service like this. Neither side is zero risk, the choice is about which option will result in fewer and less severe outages.
Including mine. I'm not angry because my flight was cancelled. It's a pain in the arse but what really infuriates me is the "We are terribly sorry" these PR releases give. I've been on hold for three hours with British Airlines and it's "we are sorry", no you're not.
"We are truly sorry for the ongoing flight disruption" is what infuriates the situation; when words have no meaning behind the phase. Pixelated hold-music I am sure is designed to make you rage further.
My wife is currently at Gatwick, supposed to have taken off 2 hours ago, but no update.... The frustrating thing is the complete lack of information. I cannot comprehend how nobody knows what the situation is. I mean, is aircraft on the tarmac yet? Has it left it's previous destination yet? etc.
Worst part is, likely no compensation as it isn't the airlines "fault".
Why the use of scare quotes? It's not their fault. The airline arranged for flight crew, had the plane available, yet something outside of their control is preventing them from doing the deed. It's no different to the airline if a sudden bit of weather came along preventing the flight from taking off.
I think the frustration comes from airlines not being able to accurately predict what the impact of a delay will be for the schedule for the remainder of the day, following day. They always hope they'll be able to recover some of the schedule with fast turnarounds.
On a recent trip (when I encountered issues on every leg — cancellations, delays, missed connections, you name it), it is clear that airlines are incentivised to not communicate delays until it is clear the delay can't be recovered. In one case, at the airline's hub, the airport displays were showing a 2 hour delay and their app showed on-time departure (to the point I had to go and ask which source to trust). Having been a frequent flyer in the past I was able to determine that the delay was likely (but airlines can swap in equipment at hubs and mitigate the delay).
Once you do have a delay the ripples are complex to handle. You have some passengers that were meant to connect to other flights. You have some that won't travel at all die to the cancellation. You then have 100+ people who you somehow have to accommodate in the coming days when flight loads are hopefully already 90+%.
To be fair to my airline, their app was actually great at offering me a rebooking option the following day when my flight was cancelled. Unfortunately, the option I selected resulted in a non-direct flight with a transfer time that was impossible in reality (shouldn't have been offered in my opinion). I was literally rebooked 5mins after they declared the flight cancelled, skipped the queues back in the departure area (I don't think the local service agents even knew about the app) and drove home to my family for an extra night.
Because making prediction and being wrong is way worst then not making one.
Plus, imo, they dont know what exactly will happen. There is likely whole bunch of negotiations and replannings going on in background with unsure results.
Why do you claim it is an Americanism? The term 'scare-quotes' was coined by a British philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, who references her use of them in a 1956 essay. This would imply that they were in use in British English at least by the 1950s, with no indication as to whether they were imported from US English.
Because nobody in this situation is accountable. I agree the airline may not be to blame for the cause, but SOMEONE is... but NATS do not carry the same responsibility.
It blows my mind that consumers have lots of protection from the airline, but we have no protection from ATC failures.
As it happens, flight just got cancelled.. so airline is responsible for hotel and rebook. Which is also unfair on them.
Completely utilitarian message. "Your flight #FLIGHTID (src -> dst @ time) is cancelled on account of REASON. For available flights click LINK. For reimbursement click LINK."
“We’re sorry, but our business model precludes timely responses in times of system stress.
As a reminder, our shareholders are our primary concern (by law) and staffing trained humans to handle in customer support during unexpected surges isn’t something that can be supported while also funding the €0.05 per share quarterly dividend paid to British Airways share holders on June 29th of this year.
We are not in a rush. If you’d like, try another airline. But they’re all the same.
> “We’re sorry, but our business model precludes timely responses in times of system stress."
It doesn't have to be that way. Here's Haley Dragoo, former head of the New York Subway's "Twitter Division".[1] She had the sense to insist on a desk in the Rail Control Center,
so she could know what was really going on. Down on the working floor, too, not up in the gallery overlooking the control room.
She was a few meters from the people directly running the subway.
Her point was that the MTA was "good at monologues" but didn't interact well. So she posted on the MTA's Twitter account, several hundred times a day. If someone asked a serious question, she'd answer quickly, with actual info. Not sugar-coating the info, just translating from "subway speak". (The operations people talk about location in terms of distance from a reference point at the start of the line, the signal number plate on each signal, but customers think in terms of stations.)
It's very New York to do that.
The MTA has dropped Twitter/X, though. Twitter/X wanted to bill them for using the Twitter/X API, and the MTA will not pay others to distribute their info. So now the MTA uses their own web site and app.
People will be angry regardless of what they say, some if they say they're sorry, some if they don't say they're sorry. Regardless of what they say, some set of people or another is going to come out and be angry about it.
What do you hope to accomplish with the phone call?
Failures happen, does it make a difference if there's someone in charge feeling a strong emotion about it? Do the call center staff have to feel genuine guilt as if their mediocre job somehow made them personally responsible?
Being angry is just as useless as faking being sorry, all they're doing is acknowledging a screwup in an automated message. Give them a break.
In the past year, I've flown for vacation twice, with delays on one leg of each.
First one, United flight from IAD to SJU, 4-5 hour delay, mechanical issue, with updates from the gate agent every 45 minutes or so, basically keeping us well apprised of the status of our plane (and when that plane was no longer viable, of the replacement plane and then replacement crew). "Flight crew saw a warning light and needs to talk to company" then "company says try again" then "that didn't work, maintenance crew coming to look at it" then a few more similar updates. No, there was nothing we could do with the info, but it was nice to know the problem was being worked - at least made me feel less out of control.
Second one, Aer Lingus from DUB to IAD, 4 hour delay, mechanical issue, no updates from the gate agent beyond "so sorry, we're delayed another hour" every hour or so. I found this much more frustrating. No, there was nothing I could do either way, but it would have been nice to know a bit more about what was wrong, who was working the problem, etc. This felt more out of control, and more frustrating.
That's fair, but the United announcements had enough detail and were timed with obvious crew movement (flight, gate, mechanical), so all seemed plausible enough. Maybe they were just blowing smoke up our collective ass, but a few details make a difference (for me, at least).
I suspect there is a name for thinking that, "if I do something, it will get resolved quicker". Lots of us won't just sit there and wait for someone to come and tell us when it is fixed because we don't trust that other people also want to resolve the problem.
This is, at best, misleading. It is common that a junction running at capacity with a pedestrian phase will always run that phase with the same timing regardless of buttons, but that same junction (never mind other junctions) may often not be running at capacity, whereupon that pedestrian phase is inserted when demanded.
Also of course outside of a junction the control system has no reason to stop the vehicular traffic if nobody demands to cross. So even in the middle of the day the only reason somebody who refuses to press the button can ever cross is that other people will press the button.
To be fair, this sort of thinking is not entirely wrong (although it may be in this case). Your priorities are not necessarily the same as whatever person/worker you are dealing with. And the priorities of the worker you are dealing with are not necessarily the same whatever organization/company/government they are working for.
For example, I was recently at the hospital to pick up a friend who was due to be discharged that day. I arrived in their room, spoke briefly with the attending nurse who said it would be a long while before the patient was discharged (as it always is at hospitals) and sat down to wait. After a couple of hours I checked in with the nurse, who said he was waiting on the social worker. My friend noted that he had already talked to the social worker, and despite her insistence, said that he didn't want or need any sort of nursing or in-home care after discharge. When the nurse heard this, he went back, printed up the discharge papers and we were soon on our way.
Why did this happen? Because job of the social worker is to push the hospital/network's post-discharge nursing and rehab system. Once this was turned down, she had no incentive to stay involved or update the discharge status. The busy nurse had no incentive to pro-actively scrutinize the forms and decide the patient was ready for discharge. The hospital itself (as an organization) had no incentive to speed up the discharge, as they were making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from his excellent insurance coverage.
If we had just sat around, and said nothing, we almost certainly would have been there for several more hours, until the next shift of nurses came in and reviewed the patient files. Sometimes you are just screaming into the void but many times it helps to speak up.
Very little you can do will have any effect on how an airplane airplanes, particularly in a systematic failure.
Advocating for your health care can have very large effects, healthcare suffers from a strong lack of someone being in charge of and following your care, it's more like a collection of poorly communicating agents giving you brief spurts of attention somehow leading to a resolution. In other words, folks are barely paying attention to you.
Because only people who aren't actually sorry spend their time saying sorry instead of doing the one thing that would actually help people – provide detailed information on what the hell is going on.
This would make ideal cover for a Russian hybrid sucker-punch.
I've spotted Russian trolls in the comments on YouTube blaming Israel for their hybrid attacks in Germany these past few days. They have form, and they have been preparing the information environment for ongoing hybrid aggression against Europe. The key "tell" it's Putin's thugs is because if ANY act is petty, thuggish, dishonourable and implausibly deniable, Russian intelligence are involved.
In any case, the perpetrators will be found and dealt with. The aggressors are dumb (otherwise they wouldn't be aggressors)... and slow learners. Ukraine can look forward to some additional aid in the coming weeks.
Don't think so. The people will still need to fly and incidents like these mean lots of planes are out of place and may need to fly extra to reposition
There is exactly one actual ocean liner left, QM2 which goes between my home city and New York. Most of the ships you're thinking of are Cruise liners, which are not in fact (unlike an airliner or ocean liner) designed to prioritize travel but are instead floating hotels which might happen to travel from one place to another.
They don't in this case, because there's plenty of other airlines offering competing service, but when disruptions do prevent air travel, for example with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, travelers cruising to their destination will burn far more fuel.
Granted, the difference in emissions of either form of traveling are absolutely nothing compared to the emissions of Eyjafjallajökull itself.
Ocean liners use several times more fuel per passenger mile than airliners.
So what? Two things can be bad at the same time. Nobody mentioned ocean liners except you. Why not bring up the greenhouse gases from landfills while you're at it?
Really often the alternative was not to make the journey. Whether that's the in-person visit to a customer site which could have been a video call (or an email) or the trip to go see how your Porsche was made in the factory.
WG21 (the C++ Standards Committee) only began to allow you to present proposals or attend committee meetings without flying around the world in... 2020 because of Pandemic restrictions.
Video conferencing was one of the technologies in Engelbart's "Mother of all demos" in 1968. Remember that year, not 2008, not even 1998, it was demonstrated in 1968 and yet I bet several readers of this comment have flown on an aeroplane to do something they could have done using video conferencing, almost sixty years later. What a joke.
Following neoliberal economic strategy has optimized for profit maxing over basic quality of life, let alone competency of building and operating complex systems. While the US is #1 in the trend, the UK is following pretty closely
That is specifically because the Tories privatised water. Historically, like most places, the vital-to-life water supply and corresponding sewage processing were owned by the public in England and Wales. People hated the idea of this being changed, but Tory doctrine says that absolutely everything should be owned by for-profit companies even though we know that can't work. So, first they forced the publicly owned companies to stop investing and then they privatised the water supply, wrote off all debt owed by the public institutions and handed the new private companies £1.5 billion because hey, if you believe in nonsense, why not?
The result was universally dismal, these private companies "leak" sewage into previously clean waterways, avoid taxes, divert as much money as possible to their off-shore owners, and of course they insist they constantly need higher and higher charges from their captive customer audience, then "oops" the money is used to pay off wealthy investors and none of the urgently needed work gets done.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37461695
Compensation yeah, only applies if the reason for the delay/cancellation was under the airline's control. Nats down is pretty clearly a reason to reject compensation claims.
That gets them off the hook for even second order effects. No harm throwing in a claim though, there's no penalty for having a claim turned down.
The legislation is on the link below, it might be worth a once-over with your chat bot of choice to understand out if your circumstances are covered:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eur/2004/261/contents
In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport. So when the next update said that the flight had been bumped 9 hours, I had all I needed to secure that and went home. Two hours later, the app announced the flight was cancelled.
Sometimes (really a lot) I want to kick GPT's/Claude's/Gemini's collective rear ends. And then there are times like these, when, with me in a funk, AI cuts straight through to the essential knowledge I need and lowers the temperature.
What jurisdiction? EU? (I would love for that to be true in the US, but I bet it isn't...)
I remember on the show Airline (docuseries about Southwest Airways) one of the passengers didn't want to fly and asked for a refund.
One of the employees was shown giving the passenger a refund of, IIRC, $27 in cash (b/c she bought the ticket in cash).
Source: Me, stuck in an airport, having witnessed numerous flights destined to London canceled throughout the day.
Likely either outsourced or done by people who are comically underpaid considering how important it is
"We are truly sorry for the ongoing flight disruption" is what infuriates the situation; when words have no meaning behind the phase. Pixelated hold-music I am sure is designed to make you rage further.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u0EL_u4nvw
Worst part is, likely no compensation as it isn't the airlines "fault".
On a recent trip (when I encountered issues on every leg — cancellations, delays, missed connections, you name it), it is clear that airlines are incentivised to not communicate delays until it is clear the delay can't be recovered. In one case, at the airline's hub, the airport displays were showing a 2 hour delay and their app showed on-time departure (to the point I had to go and ask which source to trust). Having been a frequent flyer in the past I was able to determine that the delay was likely (but airlines can swap in equipment at hubs and mitigate the delay).
Once you do have a delay the ripples are complex to handle. You have some passengers that were meant to connect to other flights. You have some that won't travel at all die to the cancellation. You then have 100+ people who you somehow have to accommodate in the coming days when flight loads are hopefully already 90+%.
To be fair to my airline, their app was actually great at offering me a rebooking option the following day when my flight was cancelled. Unfortunately, the option I selected resulted in a non-direct flight with a transfer time that was impossible in reality (shouldn't have been offered in my opinion). I was literally rebooked 5mins after they declared the flight cancelled, skipped the queues back in the departure area (I don't think the local service agents even knew about the app) and drove home to my family for an extra night.
Plus, imo, they dont know what exactly will happen. There is likely whole bunch of negotiations and replannings going on in background with unsure results.
Scare quotes are an Americanism that is gaining traction her, but normally we use it for quoting speach.
It blows my mind that consumers have lots of protection from the airline, but we have no protection from ATC failures.
As it happens, flight just got cancelled.. so airline is responsible for hotel and rebook. Which is also unfair on them.
What do you mean, it's ALL inconvenient!
As a reminder, our shareholders are our primary concern (by law) and staffing trained humans to handle in customer support during unexpected surges isn’t something that can be supported while also funding the €0.05 per share quarterly dividend paid to British Airways share holders on June 29th of this year.
We are not in a rush. If you’d like, try another airline. But they’re all the same.
Beep.”
It doesn't have to be that way. Here's Haley Dragoo, former head of the New York Subway's "Twitter Division".[1] She had the sense to insist on a desk in the Rail Control Center, so she could know what was really going on. Down on the working floor, too, not up in the gallery overlooking the control room. She was a few meters from the people directly running the subway.
Her point was that the MTA was "good at monologues" but didn't interact well. So she posted on the MTA's Twitter account, several hundred times a day. If someone asked a serious question, she'd answer quickly, with actual info. Not sugar-coating the info, just translating from "subway speak". (The operations people talk about location in terms of distance from a reference point at the start of the line, the signal number plate on each signal, but customers think in terms of stations.)
It's very New York to do that.
The MTA has dropped Twitter/X, though. Twitter/X wanted to bill them for using the Twitter/X API, and the MTA will not pay others to distribute their info. So now the MTA uses their own web site and app.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/nyregion/subway-mta-socia...
What do you hope to accomplish with the phone call?
Failures happen, does it make a difference if there's someone in charge feeling a strong emotion about it? Do the call center staff have to feel genuine guilt as if their mediocre job somehow made them personally responsible?
Being angry is just as useless as faking being sorry, all they're doing is acknowledging a screwup in an automated message. Give them a break.
First one, United flight from IAD to SJU, 4-5 hour delay, mechanical issue, with updates from the gate agent every 45 minutes or so, basically keeping us well apprised of the status of our plane (and when that plane was no longer viable, of the replacement plane and then replacement crew). "Flight crew saw a warning light and needs to talk to company" then "company says try again" then "that didn't work, maintenance crew coming to look at it" then a few more similar updates. No, there was nothing we could do with the info, but it was nice to know the problem was being worked - at least made me feel less out of control.
Second one, Aer Lingus from DUB to IAD, 4 hour delay, mechanical issue, no updates from the gate agent beyond "so sorry, we're delayed another hour" every hour or so. I found this much more frustrating. No, there was nothing I could do either way, but it would have been nice to know a bit more about what was wrong, who was working the problem, etc. This felt more out of control, and more frustrating.
Also of course outside of a junction the control system has no reason to stop the vehicular traffic if nobody demands to cross. So even in the middle of the day the only reason somebody who refuses to press the button can ever cross is that other people will press the button.
For example, I was recently at the hospital to pick up a friend who was due to be discharged that day. I arrived in their room, spoke briefly with the attending nurse who said it would be a long while before the patient was discharged (as it always is at hospitals) and sat down to wait. After a couple of hours I checked in with the nurse, who said he was waiting on the social worker. My friend noted that he had already talked to the social worker, and despite her insistence, said that he didn't want or need any sort of nursing or in-home care after discharge. When the nurse heard this, he went back, printed up the discharge papers and we were soon on our way.
Why did this happen? Because job of the social worker is to push the hospital/network's post-discharge nursing and rehab system. Once this was turned down, she had no incentive to stay involved or update the discharge status. The busy nurse had no incentive to pro-actively scrutinize the forms and decide the patient was ready for discharge. The hospital itself (as an organization) had no incentive to speed up the discharge, as they were making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from his excellent insurance coverage.
If we had just sat around, and said nothing, we almost certainly would have been there for several more hours, until the next shift of nurses came in and reviewed the patient files. Sometimes you are just screaming into the void but many times it helps to speak up.
Advocating for your health care can have very large effects, healthcare suffers from a strong lack of someone being in charge of and following your care, it's more like a collection of poorly communicating agents giving you brief spurts of attention somehow leading to a resolution. In other words, folks are barely paying attention to you.
Color me suspicious.
I've spotted Russian trolls in the comments on YouTube blaming Israel for their hybrid attacks in Germany these past few days. They have form, and they have been preparing the information environment for ongoing hybrid aggression against Europe. The key "tell" it's Putin's thugs is because if ANY act is petty, thuggish, dishonourable and implausibly deniable, Russian intelligence are involved.
In any case, the perpetrators will be found and dealt with. The aggressors are dumb (otherwise they wouldn't be aggressors)... and slow learners. Ukraine can look forward to some additional aid in the coming weeks.
Granted, the difference in emissions of either form of traveling are absolutely nothing compared to the emissions of Eyjafjallajökull itself.
So what? Two things can be bad at the same time. Nobody mentioned ocean liners except you. Why not bring up the greenhouse gases from landfills while you're at it?
Whatabouting everything is so last decade.
WG21 (the C++ Standards Committee) only began to allow you to present proposals or attend committee meetings without flying around the world in... 2020 because of Pandemic restrictions.
Video conferencing was one of the technologies in Engelbart's "Mother of all demos" in 1968. Remember that year, not 2008, not even 1998, it was demonstrated in 1968 and yet I bet several readers of this comment have flown on an aeroplane to do something they could have done using video conferencing, almost sixty years later. What a joke.
Sweden has changed so much in only 15-20 years, I can remember what it was like and I weep.
The result was universally dismal, these private companies "leak" sewage into previously clean waterways, avoid taxes, divert as much money as possible to their off-shore owners, and of course they insist they constantly need higher and higher charges from their captive customer audience, then "oops" the money is used to pay off wealthy investors and none of the urgently needed work gets done.