Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and look I know that we have just five days left before Christmas and I know that everyone's at a time of real high stress. This is the time when journeys become more imperative than ever.

And there very sadly always seems to be something which intervenes. If you go back to pre-pandemic times, can you believe this day in 2018?

So four years ago was when, well, it is believed that a drone appeared in Gatwick Airport.

Lots of controversy about whether it was actually ever there, but it was believed that an unmanned aerial vehicle was actually in the skies and threatening planes.

We had a thousand planes cancelled during that time

and 140,000 people had their plans torn up for Christmas because there simply wasn't space to

reschedule all those planes. Well, so I woke up this morning, I'm thinking the big problem that is waiting

possibly to cause issues is the UK border force strike starts on Friday at Heathrow, Gatwick,

Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff. And that's people who check

passport control. And I thought, well, that's the worst that we could possibly have this Christmas.

But no, it gets worse than that. We had a failure in the British Airways flight control system

overnight. And that happened. This is a really critical system which is um

as far as i understand it controls pretty much everything from the you know the weight of the

aircraft the number of passengers the amount of fuel the uh the um flight plan and so on so you're not going to go anywhere without it and that was out of action

i understand for some hours um planes stuck on the ground when they were in a position to go some of

them of course their pilots um were out of hours and that meant that the plane wasn't going anywhere and it effectively

either got postponed for 24 hours or cancelled altogether.

I've just heard from somebody who says that their plane was within three minutes of being

cancelled. They got out after five and a half hours behind scheduled at

London JFK. Well, you might think, well, that's really unfortunate. Sorry, everybody. And,

you know, one of those things, never mind, except that here we are at Christmas, the planes are fully flying very,

very full indeed and there is simply not the space to put everybody on board. And therefore,

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