United, an airline I used to love but now don’t use, appears to be getting more bad press from a diversion it experienced on its UA958 Chicago to London Heathrow flight on Friday. The diversion landed the flight in Goose Bay around midnight local time.
These tweets give you an idea of what’s going on:
It appears that there was a rudder problem requiring the flight to divert to Goose Bay. Passengers were taken to army barracks for the night and fed by the Canadian military, whilst the crew, in need of their crew rest time, went to a hotel. Passengers complain of being cold in the unheated barracks and United not providing any help or staff to tell people what’s happening.
Whilst diversions are relatively common, it seems that United didn’t have a plan to deal with passengers. The suggestion appears to be that the passengers were being flown to Newark and then home to the UK.
The Daily Mail has a longer article.
It looks as if they managed to fix the plane and flew it to Newark where it continued as UA2063, scheduled to land in London around lunchtime today, 14 June.
The seat plan shows a single empty seat – the rest I imagine is full of very tired passengers.
The crew gets a hotel..sigh..reminds me the 30 hours i spent stranded in DME sleeping on floors while the crew got visas and slept in a hotel.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/after-emergency-landing-in-moscow-united-airlines-passengers-appeal-for-help/485109.html
WOuld be interested to know if they get any compensation.
The empty seat was my son who got offloaded after saying he felt sick, not suprising as they had not feed him for 7hrs!
@Philip – sounds awful. I hope he is OK now, presumably still in the USA?
The bit in United’s tweet about “landing curfew” at LHR appears to be false information, unless I’m understanding them wrong. The flight is scheduled to land at LHR before 6 am, so there’s no circumstance under which it could be forced to return to the US because of landing time restrictions (at most circling for a time before landing), unless it were delayed all the way until that evening.