Section:GDN 1N PaGe:5 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 20:21 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Thursday 8 August 2019 The Guardian •
Robot, heal thyself 5
The machines with
self-repairing hands
Page 12Clean tails
The king prawns
grown in Britain
Page 15▲ Passengers at Heathrow airport’s
Terminal 5 yesterday. IT problems led
to hundreds of fl ights being grounded
PHOTOGRAPH: NEIL HALL/EPAFlight compensation rules
When airlines cancel or delay
fl ights for more than three hours,
passengers can be entitled to
compensation of €250-€600 (£230-
£555) under EU rules. The cause
of the problem has to be under
the airline’s control, and not an
“extraordinary circumstance”. Lack
of planes/staff , fl ight overbooking,
a strike by the airline’s staff , or an
IT failure are all considered to be
within the airline’s control – so
compensation is payable. It is also
payable for delays , calculated from
the scheduled arrival time.
The airlines have fought these
rules since they were introduced,
and passengers have had to go to
court to get their money. The rules
only apply to EU-based airlines or
all fl ights that start in the EU on
non-EU based carriers. What will
happen post-Brexit is not yet clear.
Miles Brignall‘We’re totally damaged’
Passengers stuck in the
BA holding pattern that
never seems to end
Damien GayleT
he group of young
travellers lay neatly
slotted together like
spoons, an intimacy
at least in part forced
on them by the single
blanket shielding them from the
sunshine beaming in through the
panoramic windows.
Asked if they had been aff ected by
the British Airways check-in fi asco,
one girl peered up and nodded. “I’ve
had one hour’s sleep and we’ve been
here 24 hours,” she croaked.
By early afternoon the crowd of
frustrated passengers that had been
waiting to check in at Heathrow
terminal fi ve had subsided. But
most of them were not on their way
to their destinations: BA h ad asked
them to clear off and promised
to reimburse any out-of-pocket
expenses. However, for some that
was not an option.Rosie Wilson and Alison McCall,
both 16, were trying to get home
to Glasgow from the south of
France when they were caught
in the logjam. They had arrived
at Gatwick that morning to fi nd
their connecting fl ight cancelled.
Wilson’s father had booked them a
replacement fl ight from Heathrow,
but that had been cancelled too.
They had been in transit since
3am. Now they were hoping for
a fl ight at 5.20pm. But the ordeal
was not over. That plane would
only get them as far as Edinburgh.
Two teenagers with no cash, they
were reliant on the airport for
refreshments. Staff handed out fun-
size bottles of water.
Tony Ambles and Olga Gridina,
a couple from London, had been
due to fl y to St Petersburg. They had
already checked in and handed over
their bags when the cancellations
were announced.
“Now we are here with no
luggage, no fl ight, nothing at all,”
said Ambles, 43. “We don’t know
what’s going to happen, because
they don’t even know, I think. We
thought about cancelling and goingsomewhere else, but now we don’t
have our luggage we can’t. ”
The next available BA fl ight to St
Petersburg wasn’t until Friday, they
had been told. They had already pre-
booked their hotel at a cost of £
and handed over £100 in visa fees
for their 10-day stay. “We probably
might cancel everything,” Gridina,
44, said. “What can we do?”
Most dejected of all was a German
family, mother, father and two
young children, sitting on the fl oor
with their backs against a temporary
partition wall.
“We’re totally damaged,” Mike
Reiter said.
They had travelled to the UK
only the day before, hoping to
stay three days in a London hostel
while seeing the sights. But they
had arrived late, the result of
bad weather, could not reach the
manager to check in to their rooms,
and had been forced to wait out the
entire night in a McDonald’s. Rather
than try to rescue their trip, they
decided to retreat home, only to fi nd
themselves stuck, waiting again, at
Heathrow.
Before they could reveal any more
details of their city-break nightmare
to the Guardian, a purple-shirted
Heathrow worker intervened. “Are
you a journalist? I’m sorry, we don’t
allow vox pops inside the terminal,”
she said. “We like our passengers to
be able to wait in peace.”‘We thought about
cancelling, but now
we don’t have our
luggage we can’t’Tony Ambles
BA passenger Continued from page 1Passenger anger
as IT meltdown
hits 500 BA fl ights
from Heathrow’s Terminal 5 between
9 .30am and midday were cancelled
or delayed, according to the airport’s
website.
It was not until 4pm that BA said it
had resolved its computer problems.
In a statement, the airline said: “We
apologise to all our customers caught
up in the disruption, and appreciate
how frustrating their experience has
been. Our teams have been working
tirelessly to get the vast majority of
customers on their way, with most of
our fl ights departing.”.
It added: “Our fl ights are returning
to normal, however there may be some
knock-on operational disruption as a
result of the issue earlier.”
The airline was still advising pas-
sengers to check for fl ight information
on its website before travelling to the
airport. Earlier this week BA fl ights
were among a total of 177 flights
cancelled and then reinstated because
of threatened industrial action by
Heathrow staff.
The strikes, originally due to be
begin at midnight on Monday , were
suspended to allow for further talks
between union and airport offi cials.
BA also faces separate strike action
from its pilots later this month. In a
ballot of the pilots’ union Balpa, 93%
of the airline’s 4,000 pilots voted in
favour of taking industrial action after
rejecting a three-year pay deal.
BA lost a legal challenge to the
strikes, which are expected to cost
the airline £40m a day.
If BA pilots do go ahead with strikes,
the likely disruption could coincide
with fi ve days of walkouts announced
late yestersay by Ryanair pilots who
are members of the Balpa union.
Balpa said “decades of Ryanair
refusing to deal with unions” had led
to members voting for a 48-hour strike
beginning on 22 August and a 72-hour
strike from 2 September.
“No pilot wants to spoil the pub-
lic’s travel plans but at the moment it
seems we have no choice,” said Balpa’s
general secretary, Brian Strutton.
A third strike action, by Heathrow
ground staff , could still go ahead on 22
and 23 August unless talks result in a
compromise.
BA had other problems earlier
this week after 200 people had to
be evacuated from one of its fl ights
after smoke poured into the cabin
minutes before it was due to land in
Valencia. The crew used oxygen masks
as they helped passengers on to the
evacuation chutes.
BA has previously been hit by
serious computer system failures that
have left passengers stranded around
the world.
In 2017, over a May bank holiday
weekend, 75,000 passengers were
stranded when the airline was forced
to cancel more than 700 fl ights over
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