(Thread subject slightly distorted to make title fit)
A British Airways flight scheduled to go to Dusseldorf mistakenly flew to Edinburghwith the pilots being unaware of the error.
I have to ask, with the multitude of checks and double-checks and safeguards built into the system that makes modern commercial air travel the safest form of transit, shouldn’t somebody on the flight crew have said at some point, “Hey, my work schedule said I was going to Dusseldorf this morning. What gives?”
You assume the crew were rostered for Dusseldorf. The most likely way this happens is the crew were only ever rostered to go to Edinburgh, got a flight plan for Edinburgh, flew to Edinburgh as always expected, but somehow ended up with the wrong load of passengers.
I’d be interested to know where the cabin crew thought they were going. If they thought it was Düsseldorf then they wouldn’t see anything amiss with the boarding passes.
But doesn’t the Captain or First Officer usually come on the public address system and say “welcome to our flight to XXX” or some such?
If the Captain says “Edinburgh” and the passengers are going to Düsseldorf, isn’t at least one going to say “wait a minute, am I on the wrong flight?”
Was everyone on the ground asleep?
When I said “flight crew” I meant both cockpit and cabin crew. Do the pilots on British Airways not come on the intercom in mid-flight to reassure the passengers they’re on time and the weather in Edinburgh is X?
My brother-in-law is a pilot on a U.S. airline. He “bids” for his flight schedule and knows in advance what routes he’s assigned to. If he was approved for Atlanta-Newark and was handed a flight plan for Atlanta-Nashville the day of the flight, he’d know something was wrong.
Imagine if he was approved for an Atlanta - Newark flight, planned an Atlanta - Newark flight, and flew an Atlanta - Newark flight but subsequently discovered the passengers were expecting to go to Nashville.
I doubt this is a case of pilots accidentally flying to a different destination than expected, it’s far more likely that they always expected to be going to Edinburgh but some stuff up with aircraft / crew / passenger assignment meant the passengers were the wrong ones.
I see in other forums that this was a contract airline that do fill in work for BA. Most likely some screwup in ops had the crew planned to the wrong destination. In these cases the crew go where they’re told.
It depends. Some companies do it, some don’t. The official check should be either the cabin crew or an electronic system checking boarding passes. Still, all it takes is for the boarding system to be configured to accept Dusseldorf passengers at that gate. A disconnect between ground ops and flight ops and reliance on automated systems would explain it easily enough.
I wonder if they didn’t have the flight map on the video screens. Maybe it was a flight that didn’t have individual screens.
Even if the passengers spoke up, the pilot may not change course. I’d expect the pilot to contact his superiors (or whoever pilots talk to while in the air for things like this), and follow their instructions, and maybe they still need the plane to go to Edinburgh for some reason and will get another plane to fly the passengers to Dusseldorf.
In the US, many of the domestic flights I take don’t have seatback entertainment systems; I think those are generally found on the larger/long-range aircraft. Perhaps the same is true of the planes used for short flights in Europe?
Even on those flights though, I’ll sometimes stick my phone near the window so I can use its GPS to see where we are. I’d be concerned if, 30 minutes into the flight, it were far northwest of London instead of somewhere over Belgium. Even passengers without benefit of GPS would probably notice from the position of they sun that they definitely weren’t flying in the direction of Dusseldorf.
This. No matter what any number of passengers said, I suspect once they were in the air they weren’t going to land anywhere but Edinburgh before sorting out the situation.
I wonder how much that flight cost the airline. An hour of fuel and flight-crew labor, plus all the airport fees/labor at each end?
I’d be willing to bet those pilots will be subjected to a lot of ribbing for some time to come.
The pilots will be nick-named “Wrong Way” for the rest of their days.
~VOW
I don’t think it was the pilots’ faults. The flight plan was submitted by someone at the airlines, and the pilots were just following that.
To paraphrase Todd Snider, “Fuck Dusseldorf! Party with us!”
For your entertainment - this is what happened when (extremely budget airline) Ryanair tried trolling British Airways: Ryanair trolling of British Airways' mistake backfires - BBC News
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