“If you think these delays and cancellations at Bristol Airport are bad now,” I breezily observed back in June, “You just wait until the school holidays. It will be chaos.” Inevitably, in line with the accuracy of most of my predictions, I was completely wrong. On the face of it, things only got better.
The anorak in me is fascinated by most things plane and airport. It used to be trains, but I have immatured into enjoying the sight of planes landing and taking off, as well as trains whizzing past. To accompany my interest, I spend far too long gazing wistfully at sites like Flight Radar 24 which offers all manner of information to suit all levels of interest.
When we went to Greece in June, delays were the norm. We had something like two hours delay at both Bristol and Corfu and we were among the lucky ones. There weren’t many cancellations but I know what a nause they are when they happen. Delays, all being well, are more of an irritation than anything else.
An unscientific analysis suggests to me that there is no particular airline that is having more delays than another. Jet 2, which was suffering some awful delays in June, is broadly similar in performance to easyJet, Ryan Air and TUI, with the odd horrendous delay the exception rather than the rule. My feeling is that it is only TUI’s long haul Dreamliner flights which are consistently delayed at Bristol and even then it’s rarely worse than a couple of hours. I say ‘only’ somewhat insensitively because a couple of hours delay prior to a 10 hour flight in Economy is not ideal. I reckon passengers will soon forget the hassle when that first holiday cocktail passes their lips.
To my millions of readers, I can only apologise for getting things so wrong. Not only that, I wrongly suggested Bristol was an outlier in the inconvenience stakes. It turns out that it’s been the same all over Europe, never mind dear old Adge Cutler International.
If you’re flying away from Britain’s typically grim apology of a summer, the good news is you probably won’t be late. The better news is that Britain’s typically grim apology of a summer didn’t turn up this year and for one year only, Britain’s weather didn’t let us down.
