I was quite happy with the Monarch service. Outbound I was too knackered to notice, but I didn’t hear any complaints from passengers or crew. We left Gatwick a little late owing to a couple of “tired” Celtic fans who fell asleep in the terminal after their bags were on.
Coming back we were all de-mob happy and in a jovial mood. The crew didn’t seem to mind this as the entire plane just about was full of BBC or BBC Scotland staff. Extra drinks were the order of the day as we regaled the cabin crew with tales of how Celtic nearly won the Uefa cup and how Porto should enter a diving team into the next Olympics.
The two crew pictured above (names forgotten) were extremely pleasant as we swapped tales of anti social shifts and irregular sleeping habits. After dumping us at Gatwick, they had one more outbound to Arrecife before knocking off for the night.
Some of our colleagues left Malaga on the Monarch flight to Luton. This was an hour late meaning they missed their Easyjet connections to Glasgow and Edinburgh. All other flights were full that evening so the producer of the programme had to charter a 60 seater to get them to GLA. I don’t know what the plane was, (it sounded like a Fokker 50 as described) but after a few grumbles from the BBC crew about having to rely on Easyjet when the rest of us got BA, they were relieved to have missed the EZY connection after watching it return to Luton with a suspected engine fire.
I gather a certain Chick Young was heard to lead the 60 strong ensemble in a karaoke contest as the chartered plane headed up into the sky towards Glasgow.
All in all a tiring but enjoyable experience, shame I never had time to see Seville’s airport and all of those charters.
My view of Seville tended to look like this for several days…
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