Well that’s fine…just make sure that you don’t come accross as too antagonistic and fall foul of rule 11 of the sticky.

The thing is that they may have only been a few hours into their duty time at that point however they have to make sure the schedule can be completed within the available remaining duty period. If not they can’t despatch unless they dump the aircraft short of destination. In that case the passengers would then have to wait for 11-12 hours before the crew would then legally be allowed to finish the journey.

Virgin engineers will tell you the same story. They all hated the bus when they first arrived as they had worked solely on Boeings for years. Now they claim they prefer the (un)plug and play style of bus maintenance that allows you to swap a rack in the avionics bay so that a fault can be taken to a workshop for repair while the aircraft gets on its way. TCX/JMC engineers were largely pro-bus as well. Many BA engineers are not so keen but then you don’t get much more of a bunch of entrenched Boeing men than there (likewise for many established american carriers)! Darned new fangled machinery…!

Danairboy, before you cause any more offence, you are obviously a fan of both Dan Air and Air Europe. OneLeft was a VERY highly regarded member of both these airlines.

Mitch Heeney, 52, from Iver, Bucks, said: “When the pilot refused to get on the plane I was ready to explode. The crowd was ready to string someone up. We’d been waiting here for hours and were going crazy.

Let’s make sure I’ve got this right…Mitch Heeney (who apparantly comes from my village, by the way!) wanted to string up a pilot who didn’t think it was safe to land several hundred tonnes of Jumbo at nearly 150+mph in a hurricane after a duty period long enough to be considered illegal! If I was a passenger and the flightdeck had chosen to go, I think I would have asked to get off!

Give me a 752 any day rather than a 753. It still looks like TCX will get another 5 next season.

…complete with new leather Recaro seats.

Excalibur used to make a big song and dance about the fact that they had these fitted to their A320’s in the early 90’s.

If you read through your confirmation details its all there

Well there you go…I bet you’ll find more than half the charter passengers get their tickets in their wallets and don’t even look at the confirmation details until they are at the airport. Even then they’ll only look at the outbound details. Then when it comes to going home they’ll just look for a number that’s familiar.

You may find that harsh but that’s just the way it is. I can wrap it up and put a great big pink bow on it if you like but that is how it is. If I had a dollar for every passenger that had kept me waiting…