Declaration of interest: even though I was not flying on easyJet’s flight 8303 from London Gatwick to Milan Malpensa on Tuesday 15 July, I had a strong interest that the Airbus A320 should depart on time. One of my sisters, Penny, was visiting another sister, Kate, for an important birthday. Penny was carrying messages and gifts from the extended family.
What could possibly go wrong? Over to easyJet, in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
“Scheduled: 9.20am. Estimated 2.54pm”
A delay like this – of five hours or more – triggers all manner of rights for the passenger. In particular you have the option to cancel for a full refund, or switch to another flight.
The good news: there were plenty of other flights. Ten minutes after the plane to Milan Malpensa was due out, easyJet had another departure to Milan Linate. If that did not suit, easyJet offered two other flights to Milan Malpensa. I checked, and seats were available. You could buy them online.
EasyJet could have invited passengers facing a five-hour delay to change to an earlier departure, but chose not to do so.
Instead, Britain’s biggest budget airline merely provided a “click here to see your rights” link, thereby fulfilling its legal duty.
That is easyJet’s choice – as is the airline’s decision to continue selling seats on the flights that would have got the delayed passengers to Milan much earlier. Instead, they were sold to new customers.
The origins of the delay? Well, from what I can see from the Flightradar24 tracking service, things went badly wrong on Monday night at Milan. The plane due to operate the flight was stuck overnight in Brindisi, southeast Italy, of all places.
EasyJet initially warned of a delay due to “a technical baggage issue” at Milan Malpensa.
Later, a spokesperson told me: “This delay was caused by air traffic control, resulting in the crew reaching their legally regulated operating hours.”
The airline insists: “The disruption to your flight is outside of our control and is considered to be an extraordinary circumstance.” In other words, you can whistle for the £220 compensation prescribed by air passengers’ rights rules.
We are not talking here about isolated airports with limited resources. Gatwick is easyJet’s biggest base. Milan Malpensa is the airline’s largest hub in continental Europe. If ever there were the opportunity to shuffle aircraft and crew, you could not hope for a better city pair.
Some nimble reassignment of aircraft could have helped; the plane for the lunchtime flight to Milan arrived at Gatwick at 9.50am, and sat on the ground for hours – just like the baffled passengers for flight 8303, who were experiencing an increasingly bizarre set of predictions for when finally they might take off.
The initial wait was predicted to be five hours, 24 minutes. Suddenly that was pulled back to just 49 minutes. But just as passengers were rushing to the airport, it became six hours.
“While the delayed flight might get a little earlier,” I said in a message to Penny about 20 minutes after she was due to leave, “I think there is a bigger chance it might get later”.
My fears proved sadly justified. EasyJet duly provided the classic example of a “creeping delay”. The delayed planeload sat and stewed while hundreds of other easyJet passengers happily flew to Milan on a succession of on-time flights.
It was painfully obvious to anyone with access to Flightradar24 that there was not a hope in hell of the plane leaving Gatwick at the rescheduled six-hour delay mark. At that point, the Airbus that easyJet had decided to use for the flight was still en route from Milan.
Yet easyJet’s Flight Tracker service continued to assert the impossible, forecasting at one point that the plane would leave 25 minutes before the actual time on the actual clock.
Flight 8303 eventually left eight hours late. Passengers had spent the equivalent of a working day being given the runaround by easyJet at its main base.
Running an airline is an extremely complicated business. But at its heart are the passengers who have paid good money in anticipation of being transported punctually to their destination. If that isn’t possible, they expect to be kept informed – and offered options that would minimise the problem.
EasyJet is well within its legal rights to behave as it did and make choices that made for a miserable day for 180 customers. But its apparent “can’t-be-bothered” attitude towards all the passengers on flight 8303, including my sister, has damaged my respect for the carrier.
Thankfully, other airlines are available.
