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Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

Today the subject is why do people not bother getting on their flights if they've got to all the trouble of getting to the airport and checking luggage in?

And what happens when they fail to show up.

This is particularly relevant because right now I should have been on the ground for half an hour.

The plane is currently approaching Heathrow. It's a British airway service from Nuremberg in West Germany.

It's scheduled to take one hour, 45 minutes for a journey of about five or six hundred miles.

And it's taken much longer than that. Here's what happened.

The plane arrived in Nuremberg.

Well on time, the passengers got on in good time,

or at least all but two of them did.

Those two passengers had checked in baggage. It sounded from the captain's announcement as though they had simply decided at the airport not to travel.

Now, he said I've been flying for 30 years and I still don't know why people do that.

I can think of a couple of possible explanations.

One of them, I'm sorry to say, is fear of flying, even though, as you no doubt know, aviation is incredibly safe.

We're coming up to 40 years since the last fatal accident involving

British airways. The other could be well who knows a family crisis, an urgent

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