Free Lunch

Fancy picking up a free lunch and a goody bag courtesy of BAA? They're looking for 15,000 people who do, in order to use them as guinea pigs to test the check-in and security systems at the new terminal 5 at Heathrow prior to its opening in March 2008. According to BAA it's all in an effort to avoid the security and baggage delays which have plagued the existing terminals over the recent past. So that's what you have to go through to earn your two rounds of cheese and pickle. As the saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse....

...it did. According to the US Department of Transportation the misery of air travel during the month of June was - miserable. Mishandled baggage reports shot up 36% - a staggering 451,260 bags either lost, late or misrouted. More passengers were involuntarily bumped from flights and the number of complaints filed by customers to the DOT increased by 54% in June compared with last year.

462 flights sat waiting to take off for more than three hours after departing their gate, and 12 were stuck for more than five hours. The record being Continental Airlines Flight 728 from Newark, N.J., to Denver on June 8 - 383 minutes -- more than six hours. It was the day an FAA computer failed and left planes grounded across the East Coast, there were also thunder storms in the Newark area that afternoon.

Come Fly The Crowded Skies

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal between January and May of this year, about 74% of US flights arrived on time, the lowest percentage since the Bureau of Transportation Statistics started keeping records of this kind in 1995. The number of delays and cancellations in June may have been the worst ever. According to FlightStats.com, 20,301 flights were cancelled in the U.S., more then double the number grounded in June 2006. Among the 40 largest U.S. airlines, more than 30% of flights scheduled to land in the U.S arrived late.

Avoiding Delays

Over at the Fodor web site there's a piece entitled Flying the Unfriendly Skies This Summer that has suggestions on how to make travelling better. A question is posed on, what can I do to avoid delays?

Fly early in the morning. Flight-delaying summer storms tend to occur in the late afternoon. You might also book flights on Tuesday or Thursday. These are the days when fewer people are travelling and congestion in the skies is at its lowest. Book non-stop flights whenever possible...

If you're on a budget then the early morning flights are often the most expensive and for many destinations there may only be one flight a day. Ultimately the only way to avoid delays is not to go at all and if you do still want to fly make sure the aircraft type has a 7 in it's designation and better still a 7 in the flight number. But ultimately you'll just have to be very lucky.

A 168 Hour Delay....

Next time you get involved in a delay spare a thought for one passenger who has just spent a week stranded at JFK. A Flyglobespan plane was struck by lightning on 28 June before a flight to Ireland while sitting at John F. Kennedy International Airport; it was subsequently grounded. A replacement could not be sent from the airline's base in Glasgow, because of the heightened state of security alert, and more than 200 passengers were left stranded in the USA. The last passengers didn't get home until a week later.

The carrier has "apologized profusely" for the delays and inconvenience to the passengers and said the terrorist attack incident "misplaced much of our fleet and crew and severely hampered our ability to mount an earlier rescue flight." Several passengers, who 'felt abandoned', had little choice but to find their own way home at their own expense. The airline's chairman, Tom Dalrymple, placed some blame on Swissport, their ground handlers for failing to effectively communicate the situation to affected passengers.

Now one assumes the airline had more than just third party representation at JFK. There are also just a few other airlines that fly across the Atlantic; presumably some had empty seats even at this peak time. A spokesperson for Flyglobespan said "When the dust settles on all of this we will have an internal inquiry into a number of things and how our handling agents performed will be one of them."