So just out of interest, what happened to the passengers of the Edinburgh flight, do they then become delayed? Does an airline sacrifice one delay for another?

Don’t know about this specific case, but yes sometimes they do “sacrifice one delay for another”. They might elect to delay the flight with the least passengers or with the fewest connections at destination (especially if a tech delay is going to go overnight and they need to hotac the pax – not an issue in Ryanair’s case! :p ), they may delay one flight in preference to another because of a night-time airport closure, or crew hours (wanting to get a crew back to base in hours), or a maintenance input, need to have an aircraft at a specific base overnight (especially if one flight needs to be cancelled), etc, etc. That’s what Ops Control do – try to find the solution that disrupts the operation as a whole the least, not only for those immediately affected but also for the follow-on operations.

If I remember correctly, a pitot heat problem usually precludes flight into known icing condition and limits to VMC only (was on a Delta flight some years ago with a similar problem and the captain said they’d dispatch if a bit of cloud in the LAX area disipated – it didn’t!), so the broken aircraft was probably not a practical proposition for either EDI or BRS until fixed.

A