How the Dreamliner delayed my dream holiday

Two hours’ delay, when the scheduled flight time is less than two hours, is unacceptable. You have to put this into perspective. If my 15-minute train journey is delayed by 15 minutes, then this 100% delay is equally unacceptable. In this case, two hours is disproportionately long compared to the scheduled flight time.

It was clear that rerouting was mismanaged. Rather than allowing some flights to be delayed by 100% or more but other flights (e.g. long haul) to be delayed by only 5% or 10%, air traffic control (or whoever was responsible), should have ensured that most flights were delayed by only 20% of their scheduled flight time. To achieve this, long haul flights should have been diverted to further afield and short haul flights should have been given priority at other London airports.

The logic for equating percentage time delay as a decider to who lands first seems rather dubious and I wonder if NFH is having a joke.

My supposition is that long-haul flights are probably shorter of fuel whereas short-haul tend to do many quick flights and fuel more rarely as a ratio to landings. Also not all airports can necessarily take all airliners so without going into advanced research I think we can assume that the landing priority is based on safety aswell as practicality.

From Paris Miss Brunwin had three other methods to return to the UK so if the incident had escalated and closed Heathrow returning would not have been impossible.

Fuel doesn’t come into it. They could have landed many incoming long haul flights in Manchester and Birmingham so that short haul flights could land at other London airports. To land a LHR-bound short haul flight in Paris is absurd. Again using percentages, allowing all flights to fly 95% of the distance to their destination would have been preferable to allowing some (e.g. NCE-LHR) to reach only 65% and others (e.g. JFK-LHR) to reach 99%.

I think the point you made was very clearly put.

However the implicit message that air travel is wonderful and that it has no social knock-on effects worth considering is rather grating. Perhaps if politicians and the media spent a year living under the Heathrow flight-path there might be more heed paid to the health effects already reported:

” There are health consequences of elevated sound levels. Elevated workplace or other noise can cause hearing impairment, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, annoyance, sleep disturbance, and decreased school performance. Although some hearing loss occurs naturally with age,[2] in many developed nations the impact of noise is sufficient to impair hearing over the course of a lifetime.[3][4] Elevated noise levels can create stress, increase workplace accident rates, and stimulate aggression and other anti-social behaviors.[5]

A large-scale statistical analysis of the health effects of aircraft noise was undertaken in the late 2000s by Bernhard Greiser for the Umweltbundesamt, Germany’s central environmental office. The health data of over one million residents around the Cologne airport were analysed for health effects correlating with aircraft noise. The results were then corrected for other noise influences in the residential areas, and for socioeconomic factors, to reduce possible skewing of the data. The study concluded that aircraft noise clearly and significantly impairs health, with, for example, a day-time average sound pressure level of 60 decibel increasing coronary heart disease by 61% in men and 80% in women. As another indicator, a night-time average sound pressure level of 55 decibel increased the risk of heart attacks by 66% in men and 139% in women. Statistically significant health effects did however start as early as from an average sound pressure level of 40 decibel.[6]” Wikipedia