London-bound passengers stranded in Canada military barracks as flight crew rests in hotel

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
61

Another point: the passengers were able to walk to the military barracks because they were at the airport. How do you get 200 people to 5 different motels? Bus them, perhaps?

Well, except here’s what the Happy Valley-Goose Bay tourism site says:

(Bolding and caps in the original.)

So how many taxis are there? Doesn’t say. But assuming 4 passengers per car load, that’s 50 taxi trips to get the passengers to the motels. Assume the taxis are SUVs and can take 6 passengers per trip, and you’re looking at about 33 trips. How long would it take to get all the passengers to their motels, and back in the morning when the plane is fixed? How many passengers would be standing around waiting for the taxi to come pick them up? How many would be waiting in the terminal in the morning as the taxis dropped off passengers from the five motels?

If the goal is to get back in the air as soon as possible, keeping all the passengers at the airport is the most efficient.

62

Now explain how they couldn’t possibly get them their luggage!

63

Did they have security screening at the airport so they could check all the luggage before putting it back onboard? Did they have luggage handling equipment? It would have seriously delayed getting them to their hotels, and getting them back on the flight once the plane was fixed.

One flight I was on was diverted from Hong Kong to Taipai, and we were all sent to the hotel with just our carry-on luggage. It’s why you carry what you need for an overnight at all times.

64

United Airlines COO Jay Bulworth, says, basically, “Sorry for saving your lives and refunding your money so you had a free one-way trip to London! It won’t happen again – believe me. The complainers are all banned from our airline.”

65

Who travels overseas without a well packed carryon. It’s travel 101- meds, toothbrush, change of clothes. What would they have done if they were trapped on that tarmac or in the airport?

66

Indeed.

it is hard to imagine such an airport has the facilities for the civilian baggage handling.

I can only imagine the scandals of the lost luggage… (forgotten perhaps) with no tracking or controles.

our friend seems to have no idea of logistics or security.

67

The airline is responsible for getting passengers to their final destinations. When you buy a ticket from, say, Des Moines to London with a connection in Chicago, the airline’s legal obligation is to get you to London, not Chicago.

This was a much larger airplane than is ever scheduled into Goose Bay. Luggage is kept in containers, which can only be loaded with special lifting equipment. It’s not like you see on smaller planes, where the luggage is just tossed in.

68

That would require re-opening the passenger terminal and tracking down and calling in the baggage person, security guard and airport manager and making them work overnight. It would require the baggage person having qualifications and access to equipment to unload the plane (which was much larger than the wee regional props that the civil aviation side of the facility handles). It would also require calling in the CBSA, who in Goose Bay are only set for planes of up to 17 passengers, and making them work overnight. Keeping passengers standing about for for hours waiting for luggage and customs and immigration processing, and then waiting for taxis to deliver them to various accommodations, would prevent many of them from actually getting to bed until the middle of the night or later. The next day, there would be further delays in taking off due to the meals, taxi and baggage issues. All this so that people who were going to be wearing the same clothes on the overnight flight would have another fashion option. That’s just plain silly.

If cold, then ask for another blanket or another room.

If not wanting to sleep in clothes that would have continued to have been worn on the overnight flight anyway, then sleep in the duff . . . in a narrow bed . . . with your spouse . . . who is also in the duff . . . in the narrow bed with you . . . and either get some sleep or find something reproductive to do.

It’s really that simple.

Elbows, why the hate against barracks?

69

Missed edit: It would also require calling in the CBSA, who in Goose Bay *for non-scheduled flights *are only set for planes of up to 17 passengers, and making them work overnight.

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If any of these people want to swap “my worst night traveling” stories with me, I’m in. Mine involves the Sahara sand under me, an extremely leaky tarp and a massive rainstorm above me, and a few Taureg gentlmen (and their extended families) with wandering hands wedged in on all sides of me.

What was that about the single bed?

71

A great idea! You’ll get to the hotel, and then…in the morning you’ll hitchhike back to the barracks and…

…and you’ll know what time the flight will take off again because…

…so you’ll know exactly when to start hitchhiking because…

Sounds like a great recipe for being Left Behind to me.

72

Considering why the Goose Bay airbase was built during WWII, I love the fact that it has since hosted a guest deployment from the Luftwaffe. :slight_smile:

73

Oh please! It’s an international freaking airport. They have the ability to get the damn luggage! What? It takes a little longer because they have to scare up a couple of people? It’s one flight!

The hotels are ten minutes from the airstrip. Are you saying the airline, that has displaced and delayed these people, by a DAY can’t abide being delayed an hour in the morning while they reload baggage and gather all the passengers? Y’know, like every airport, everywhere, does every hour of every damn day!

Or can only the crew be trusted to manage the ten minutes to the hotel and back on time?

It’s ridiculous I think, to try and defend this. I see it as gross mistreatment by the airline. I hope they get fined.

74

:confused: No, it’s freaking not.

Seriously, I’m looking through a list of recent flights, and I’m not seeing anything larger than a Dash 8. Why do you think they have equipment for unloading baggage containers from widebody jets?

75

On a flight to Africa from Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, our 1 AM flight was scratched due to mechanical problems. It took us about 3 hours to get our luggage even in a major airport. We got to our hotel about 5 AM.

(Another time my luggage was delayed and Air France gave me the most wonderful overnight bag I’ve ever received from an airline - this being France, they even thoughtfully included a condom.)

76

elbows, is it possible you’re confusing Goose Bay Airport, which is a smallish military airport in Labrador, with Gander International Airport, which is an international airport on the island of Newfoundland?

The wiki article on Goose Bay, for instance, says:

“General aviation” means civil aircraft other than scheduled aircraft.

Gander, on the other hand, takes in scheduled aircraft, such as Air Canada and WestJet. It has considerable capacity for large planes to land, as shown by Operation Yellow Ribbon, where Canada welcomed as many planes as possible when aviation was grounded after 9/11:

77

Is there an article about this? I couldn’t find it. Really, really, banned? Since when did they hire Marley?

78

I think you have too much faith in the hotels having rooms available. I once had an unscheduled overnight in Brisbane, a moderate sized city with a population of a bit over 2.2 million. Lots of hotel rooms you would think. But I had to stay in an adjacent town a $250 taxi ride from the airport because the company I work for could not find me a room in Brisbane at late notice. That’s right, they paid $500 in taxi fares because there were no hotel rooms available in the city.

Do you think there may be the teeny tiniest possibility that out of the 5 hotels in Goose Bay there may have only been few rooms to spare? Or do you believe that hotels are generally empty in readiness for an influx of stranded passengers?

79

I learned something new today. There is a Waterloo Regional International Airport. I have lived and worked in Waterloo, and in London, and on the west side of the Golden Horseshoe, but I never realized that Waterloo had an international airport. It’s website says it has a flight each week to Cuba in the winter, a flight a day to Calgary, and two flights a day and one on Saturday to Chicago.

Anyway, Goose Bay is only marginally more active than Waterloo when it comes to passenger service, and 264 times less active than Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Goose Bay barely made it into the top 50 of Canada’s passenger airports. You see, International Airport sounds grand and all, but all it means is that there is someone from the CBSA working there for processing freight and passenger arrivals from out of the country.

Goose Bay has a huge and well founded reputation as an air force base with a proud history in WWII which has continued on to include nukes (although I wouldn’t exactly call a USAF flight originating out of Goose Bay detonating a nuke over the St. Lawrence a high point), SAC, more recent international training, and SAR.

Gander, not Goose Bay, controls air traffic on the western side of the North Atlantic, but Goose Bay catches planes that are tired from flapping their wings against the jet stream and tops up their tanks.

Goose Bay is toppers as an Air Force base, but is barely on the map as a passenger airport, and the Goose Bay + Happy Valley community is a very small town. To put this in perspective, imagine 16,000 of Krishna’s wives dropping out of the sky on your city, London, Ontario, (2.4% of London’s population, which is the same proportion as what descended on Goose Bay) shortly before midnight on a Friday night a week before the solstice, demanding to be driven about and put up in hotels and motels. Or imagine that the 144,000 redeemed from the earth in Revelation 14:1–5 landed late on a Friday night in Metro Toronto demanding the same thing (2.4% of Metro Toronto’s population, which is the same proportion as what descended on Goose Bay) .

The one thing that Goose Bay had that neither London nor Toronto would have in proportionally similar circumstances was the barracks, which were ideal, but for the heat not working in some rooms, which was not a known or reasonably foreseeable fact when the decision was made during the emergency. In short, the right decision was made.

80

And it was built by Americans and presently is being maintained by a British company (Serco), so it’s ironic that it was Americans and British who were so evilly imprisoned in the barracks in coffin sized beds with icicles for sheets.