Out of Adversity

For the best part of two years I have been flying back and forwards between London and Carcassonne, using the much maligned by many, low cost service operated by Ryanair. In that time, and I don't know how many flights it is, I have suffered one inconvenient diversion to Perpignan, when Carcassonne was fogged in, and a few half hour late departures. Other than that the service has been excellent.

I am not going to enter the debate about the rights and wrongs of air travel because there is so much opinionated guff and twisted statistics touted by people on both sides of the argument that it is impossible to understand the true position. I've made my lifestyle choice - end of story. Likewise I do not think that the service is poor or that one is 'ripped off' at every opportunity. It is a 'no frills' airline, so you get no extras unless you pay for them. Even then it is still cheaper than the alternatives.

However, the law of averages is such that I was bound to get stuck in airline/airport misery at some point and this week it happened. Cancelled flight, wasted trip to the airport, back home, back again the next day, lost 36 hours etc etc.

The day started with indicators that all was not going to be well. My cab was 5 minutes late picking me up, no big deal, except that I have done this journey so often that I now leave virtually no slack time in my schedule, for which I only have myself to blame. A couple of extra red lights more than normal and I missed, just, my usual train. Again, no big deal, another one in 15 minutes which would still leave me just enough time to get through security and get to the gate - no coffee, no shopping, no stopping en route. Actually, I could have dawdled all I liked.

At the gate there was a full compliment of passengers but no sign of a plane, the first indicator that all was not well. An announcement followed almost immediately - our plane was on final approach and would be here very soon. It had been delayed because of fog across Northern Europe, a fact that was to be of significance later in the day as it obviously had a knock-on effect on their whole fleet, but at this point just meant that we were running about 15 minutes late, which was nothing and could easily have been made up during the flight.

So we boarded and settled into our seats and nothing happened. The pilot's voice crackled over the intercom - sorry about the slight (ha) delay / noticed a technical fault when flying to Stansted / engineers now working on it / should take about an hour.

It's a bizarre aspect of human nature, well, maybe it's English human nature, that it takes something unusual or a bit of adversity for people to start talking to each other. Up until that announcement, everyone was settling into their seats, creating their own bit of personal space using elbows and bags and water bottles as demarcation points and were all very head down, avoiding eye contact. Immediately after the announcement, there was a collective sigh and groan and then a resignation as to the situation and everyone looking at each other uttering "What a pain" or "Just what I need" or "Not much we can do". This rapidly became "Do you want to borrow my paper, I've finished with it" - we are all in this together so let's support each other type comments - and then finally "Hi, my name is Peter" and "Why are you heading to the Languedoc?" type introductions followed by the whole plane talking to each other. If all that hadn't happened I probably wouldn't have got talking to Simon, which would have been a shame because we have a lot in common - more of that later.

An hour later at about the time we should have been landing in Carcassonne, the pilot came back with more news. The engineers hadn't been able to fix the fault and we all had to get off the plane and go back into the terminal and wait whilst an alternative plane was found. More sighing and groaning and resignation as to the situation.

At this point, Ryanair customer service started to deteriorate along with the patience and temper of the passengers. The sequence of events went as follows - there will be a further announcement at 1.30pm (nearly two hours away) - the second Carcassonne flight of the day was announced and departed (very irritating to all) - at 1.30pm we were told that our flight would leave at 22.10pm!, cue pandemonium, shouting, finger pointing and much outrage from about 75% of the passengers who totally lost it - I thought there was going be a riot which would have been interesting to watch and felt very sorry for the one departure gate assistant who was left to pass on this information and face the music, which was a disgrace on Ryanair's part - they should have had five or six people there and certainly someone more senior to talk to passengers.

Whilst the majority shouted and raved at the lone red-faced and stressed-out assistant, who was desperately calling for back-up, the rest of us discussed the options. The flight wasn't cancelled, just delayed, so we couldn't switch to another flight unless we paid - besides which, the second Carcassonne flight had gone and the Perpignan one was about to leave which left Dinard, La Rochelle and Marseilles as not very useful options - so we just had to sit and wait until 10.00pm.

Finally, a manager arrived - pursed lips, ginger hair and a face like stone. Ten minutes later she announced that the flight was cancelled and her demeanour said very clearly that she couldn't give a damn. That was the cue for me to leave - there was never any point arguing and certainly no point arguing with her, so I left everyone to it and headed for the exit. There was a long queue at the reservations desk so I went straight to the train back to London, phoned Debrah for the Ryanair bookings number and managed to re-book over the phone for the following day.

So I finally got here at 4.00pm on Friday instead of lunchtime on Thursday - a waste of 36 hours but no harm done otherwise. I felt a bit sorry for the families and holidaymakers who would find it much more difficult to re-book and probably only had a fixed amount of time down here and I'm absolutely certain that Ryanair just left them to sort it out for themselves.

However, I did make a new acquaintance - the aforementioned Simon - who lives with his wife and young daughter in the Minervois. Small world that it is, he knows, from his previous life working in pharmaceuticals, one of our main contacts in the NHS with whom we are working to set up the clinical trials of the new product that my London job is bringing to market. His wife is also a Master of Wine, which could be interesting for me as a wine lover and me as proprietor of apartments to let. We have since exchanged emails and are planning to meet next week - indeed he has taken up my spare ticket for the Samoa v Tonga Rugby World Cup match next Sunday. Funny how fate throws people together in the oddest of circumstances.