February 12th - The things that can go wrong with flights
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 2025
⏱️ 4 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After a trip involving six intercontinental flights, I have arrived back at Birmingham airport over an hour behind schedule. The sequence since leaving the UK two weeks ago goes: Cancelled, Late, Cancelled, Late, Late, Late.
Don't put too much store by the airlines' schedules.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. |
| 0:04.0 | It's Wednesday the 12th of February. |
| 0:06.0 | Birmingham Airport and the flight has arrived over an hour late, |
| 0:11.0 | which brings to a total of about five disrupted flights I have had. |
| 0:17.0 | Since I began two weeks ago, so the very first fright was pretty sure away from Heathrow to Singapore. |
| 0:23.6 | That was cancelled whenever I was at the gate. |
| 0:25.6 | Luckily, apart from me, I was a bit late getting through. |
| 0:30.6 | I got re-booked on Singapore Airlines, which was late as well. |
| 0:34.6 | Over two hours later, I should have had arrived. |
| 0:36.6 | And now I'm sprinting |
| 0:38.6 | through to try to get to the front of the passport queue because I booked my train with an hour |
| 0:45.4 | to spare and we're now over an hour late so yeah there I was super couple of hours late but |
| 0:51.8 | I could still make my connecting flight on Jet Star to Melbourne from Singapore, except that got cancelled as well. |
| 1:00.2 | A sick pilot on that occasion. So I re-booked another flight following day for Emirates. That was late for reasons which were never explained. |
| 1:08.6 | And then coming back from Australia well the first |
| 1:12.9 | flight was late leaving but actually made up time and then who K 37 that was the |
| 1:19.3 | one I've just been on 80 minutes late leaving Dubai and that was because a passenger |
| 1:26.4 | needed to be moved and it appeared that they needed |
| 1:29.6 | to be moved for a reason involving the police it was never made clear once somebody gets off |
| 1:34.9 | the plane first of all you've got to get their bag but then the next thing you've got to do |
| 1:38.5 | is to check absolutely every area accessible to the passengers to ensure nothing has been left on. |
| 1:46.0 | Anyway, I just made it through to the border. |
... |
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