April 16th - What to know if you're flying to the Middle East
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
I'm at Heathrow airport – assessing the prospects for travellers who are flying to and from the Middle East, Asia and Australasia in the light of increasing tensions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon, called our back at Heathrow Terminal 3. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm just having a look at the arrivals at the airport because, well, the terrible events of Saturday night when Iran launched a missile attack on Israel are still reverberating. |
| 0:23.8 | Basically, an awful lot of airlines changed their flight paths very suddenly on Saturday nights. |
| 0:31.2 | A number of them, for instance, British airways out to Amman, turned around over Switzerland and came home, Virgin Atlantic |
| 0:39.1 | out to Mumbai, realised they wouldn't be able to get there without pausing at Istanbul to |
| 0:44.8 | refuel. And since then, a lot of airlines have continued to fly a less ideal route. |
| 0:53.5 | Add to that, the problems that we're seeing today caused by massive storm in Dubai, |
| 1:01.2 | obviously one of the world's busiest airports. And you can see why I'm just looking up at the |
| 1:05.4 | screens here. Things aren't going particularly well. So Bengaluru, the lovely Indian city, Virgin is just over an hour late coming in from there. |
| 1:17.3 | Qantas landed 85 minutes late from Sydney via Singapore. |
| 1:23.1 | Bear in mind that its non-stop flight from Perth to Heathrow has simply been cancelled because they cannot |
| 1:29.6 | get all the way in one go and worst of all we've got Emirates EK1 their flagship flight from Dubai that's |
| 1:39.7 | two hours late and that's partly because of having to fly an interesting route and partly because of |
| 1:46.3 | the storms this morning and of course that aircraft an airbus a380 world's biggest passenger |
| 1:51.8 | plane comes in it's turning around it's going out it will probably be an hour or so late |
| 1:57.7 | at which point added to the extra time getting to Dubai, people are going to start |
| 2:04.3 | missing their flights. So, for instance, if you look at, well, Glasgow to Sydney, you've got a really |
| 2:11.3 | nice, fast, 70-minute connection at Dubai, which is great as long as your plane isn't an hour or more late as it has been. |
| 2:21.7 | So, yeah, it's a difficult situation, loads of people in Dubai trying to get re-booked. |
| 2:26.9 | And frankly, it's going to be a mess for a number of days. |
| 2:31.6 | So, where are we? |
| 2:33.3 | Well, most airlines still giving the area a wide birth. There's really two |
... |
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