Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder, Friday the 28th of June.

What a week it has been for anybody trying to fly in, out or indeed within the UK.

This time last week we had air traffic control staff shortages at Gatwick Airport. We've then since seen

problems at Manchester Airport. There was a voltage surge in the early hours of Sunday morning.

That led to the cancellation of 140 flights affecting about 20,000 people. Things moved on. Network rail overrunning engineering works

made it difficult for some people to get to Stansted Airport on Tuesday morning for the first

wave of flights and then the British Airways allocation system broke down which had the immediate

effect of, well, causing lots of problems with

lost luggage. Then, into the storms, which have been besetting central and eastern Europe

for much of the week, I'm actually speaking to you from beside the Saint-Rour River in

western, eastern France, and that's very, very hot and

humid and well you have all the ingredients for a miserable, miserable experience, lots of cancellations,

lots of long delays. I'm hearing from people. I've just got a message in saying, oh yeah,

we landed at Berlin. We had to wait 70 minutes for a gate because everything's out of position.

Another one, we're on the plane to Rome.

We've got a three-hour wait for our slot.

Now, all of that is going to cause huge problems with knock-on effects for crew hours,

for canceling flights later in the day.

But in the middle of all that, the last thing you want is for the world's busiest single runway airport suddenly to be closed because the runway

is blocked. That's exactly what happened at lunchtime today. So it involved a British Airways

aircraft at Boeing Triple 7 taking off for Vancouver.

It rejected its departure in the middle of the runway. And as a result, well, the fire service was

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