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Anorak News | Detour Operator

Detour Operator

by | 17th, March 2004

‘ONE of the great hidden benefits of travelling by budget airline is the element of surprise.

Luton to Glasgow via Nice

Sure, you have to pay for your own food and toilet roll is sold by the single sheet, but what other means of transport would have taken in Jersey on a trip form Edinburgh to Nottingham – at no extra charge?

For those of you without a grasp of the nation’s geography, Edinburgh is in Scotland and far to the north of Jersey, which lies off England’s south coast. Nottingham is somewhere between the two.

You do not have to go via Jersey to get to Nottingham but, as we say, budget airlines like to enliven a boring trip and so it was that flight WW5198 took passengers of an unscheduled tour.

The Mail even draws a map of the journey, and hears how the bmibaby jet ‘hijacked’ passengers who did not want to go to the island.

‘It wouldn’t have mattered what we’d done,’ says passenger Helen Coates, who was part of a stand-up protest onboard. ‘It seemed bmibaby would have just hijacked us… We were at their mercy.’

So Jersey it was, on a mission to airlift 46 passengers to safety who had been stuck on the island since their own budget plane had malfunctioned.

All passengers have been offered compensation for their suffering, although the coupons are only redeemable in Kabul – which is fine for those on the regular Cardiff to Manchester service, but not so good for the others…’



Posted: 17th, March 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink