38 Hour Delay

Too simplistic I suspect.

Crew have restrictions on their hours. Planes have maintenance checks to be made. Airports have restricted opening times.

In fact one of the arguments in the BA leasing application was this is peak time (start of school holidays) and there are precious few planes for lease around EU.

Of course more cynically many airlines are shabby operators who look to cut costs at every turn. Once EU compensation kicks in at 4 hours there is little incentive to extract the proverbial digit. The cost of the hotels etc is probably outweighed by the cost of leasing a plane in mid summer.

But I agree, this seems to happen year after year.

ASL Airlines France is operating this flight for Thomson/TUI, don’t know the lease basis. It’s flight number has FPO prefix. ASL’s callsign is French Post. Thomson often use aircraft at the less popular UK airports (Aberdeen, Norwich, Doncaster, Humberside) from airlines such as Smartwings. Thomas Cook and Monarch have been known to use Enter Air, Small Planet, Alba-Es, Strategic.

It does happen year after year. All the UK charter/package holiday companies do it, mostly without incident. The arrangement is either put in place for the operating season or an aircraft is brought in to cover a “tech”. A few years ago Monarch customers endured lengthy flights in aircraft of doubtful vintage, culminating in an eastern-European registered 737 skidding off the runway at BHX (brake malfunction). If you were unlucky enough to be switched to one of these aircraft, Monarch would hand you a letter at check-in.

There should be a way to transfer passengers to other flights if there is capacity and the delay is likely to exceed, say, 8 hours.