Taking Flight
The other weekend I joined two new clubs both with increasing membership, one called ‘victims of the volcano’, the other ‘really f****d off with Ryanair’.
Entry is expensive, in my case more than £400.
On a Saturday morning I arrived at Malaga airport, smug, refreshed and renewed following a short spring break. You know the feeling; wall to wall sun, successfully handing back the hire car without adding to its battered exterior and ready to return to Blighty to figure out what Lib-Con actually means.
Then on seeing the departure board my heart sank - my Ryanair flight to East Midlands was flashing in red… cancelado/cancelled/cancelado/cancelled.
Surely not, we had a dinner appointment in Derby that evening!
Stranger still, all Ryanair flights were shown as cancelled but other airlines appeared to be running as normal. What had happened? Had Ryanair finally disappeared up Michael O’Leary’s rhetoric?
The answer? Once again, that unpronounceable volcano in Iceland was sharing its booty, this time with northern Spain.
Now, during the Easter week shutdown of European airspace I, like so many others watching the chaos on TV, thought ‘there but for the grace of God’.
We take flying around so much for granted and not being able to hop on and zig-zag the world at will is quite a shock. It’s an essential part of modern life and many businesses depend on aviation.
The mystery last Saturday was how could bmibaby, easyJet and others still operate with Ryanair grounded?
Apparently, they simply flew round and over the ash – something clearly beyond Ryaniar’s wit, or was it their pocket?
Did we get any information such as a text to warn us? Did we hell! At the airport, the stressed out Ryanair rep simply stated “we are an online airline and you will have to rebook online”.
Do you know what – I did rebook online, only this time with bmibaby.
Like the hundreds of other Ryanair refugees I joined the mad scramble for other flights and ended up in Birmingham. OK, it’s not the East Midlands but I’ve always believed in a unified Midlands anyway and still made dinner, albeit £400 lighter.
Here in Derby, so many of my colleagues in the Rolls-Royces, Bombardiers and Smiths spend much of the week in different parts of the world. Many got stuck in that Easter chaos. Now, even with my mild inconvenience, I can truly join in those Dunkirk-spirit bar conversations on overcoming the ash.
This week’s new ash-related cancellations are beginning to stretch even the most patient. Businesses are becoming really concerned, thus the critical comments from Richard Branson among others.
An article in the Sunday Times claimed the disruption could last for 140 years. No kidding. There is something clearly wrong with the revised safety margins and if we are not going to run a lot of businesses into the ground something needs to be done, and soon.
A chance for the new Lib-Cons to show some common sense?
John Forkin is director of Marketing Derby
