‘And today’s flight time is about three hours’ the pilot said….’wait, from Barcelona to London’ – how can that be, I thought?

Well it turns out that the French Air Traffic Control were having a strike and this meant that my BA flight could not enter French airspace.  We waited 40 minutes on the ground at BCN before we were permitted to leave. Unfortunately the moving map was not working so we couldn’t follow progress! All we knew was that the flight would be very very long.

Shortly after take off the crew came around with drinks, followed by a cooked breakfast with granola and some biscuits. There were warm breads – rolls and croissants.

Knowing that the flight was not full but would be long, the crew were pretty attentive to the passengers. Running lots of drinks refills the crew were in the cabin for a lot of the time. I had charged my iPad in the lounge and so was ready with some movies to keep me entertained.

About an hour out of Heathrow, the pilot brought through a message from the rebookings centre. I had never had one before and so asked to keep it as a souvenir:

I understood Carol’s confusion. My trip was booked from Barcelona to London, on to JFK and then to Charlotte (my BA year has just started again!). The next day I was due to leave Charlotte to get to St. Kitts.  Plus, American Airline’s multiple flight changes meant a lot of cancelled segments in the booking.

Luckily, I had called AA on the ground at BCN and knew that I had been rebooked direct from London to Charlotte on a flight that I would make. So, I asked the Captain if she could simply confirm this back to Carol.

We landed around the new time we had been told, and pulled up to the gate just as the flight I should have been on to JFK was pushing back. That was just rubbing it in.

BA’s flight from Barcelona arrives in the same terminal as AA leaves from – Terminal 3, making connections a little easier – i.e. you don’t need a bus.

Impressed that this sort of thing happens, I had hoped that someone from AA would be meeting the flight with new boarding passes, but there was no one there. I went straight to flight connections where, amazingly, the boarding pass I had for a flight that had already left, worked to get me through security. I was able to get a new boarding pass at the AA desk and then made my way to the AA lounge.

Oh yes, and the routing we took – almost twice as far as the direct routing – but no more Avios of course!