Flight delays and cancellations on last day of school holidays

The London City red eye flight circled off the south coast before diverting to Stansted yesterday morning, causing the return leg from London City to be cancelled and slightly delaying the next service, which was to Edinburgh.

Aurigny has had to use various aircraft on Sunday and again yesterday to cover services, as G-OATR is still having maintenance and another ATR is having technical problems.

G-OGFC flew on Saturday lunchtime, but was then grounded all Sunday and was still not flying yesterday.

A Blue Islands plane operated the red eye to Manchester, but was delayed, and this caused knock-on delays when the plane was used again for the mid-morning Gatwick rotation.

A Titan Airways jet was pressed into action yesterday afternoon, operating a two services from Gatwick.

On Sunday a Blue Islands aircraft was used on an Exeter rotation, but plans to use the Titan Airways jet for the 5.20pm Gatwick Sunday flight appeared to fall through when the service was cancelled.

Instead another Titan jet appeared to be brought in to do the last Gatwick rotation in reverse – picking up the 7.40pm from Gatwick to get passengers to Guernsey, before transferring the 6.10pm passengers to London. But as the jet arrived over Guernsey at about 9pm, the southwesterly wind was at about 28mph.

It made two attempts to get down – dropping to 1,200 feet – before returning to Gatwick, causing both flights to be cancelled.

The last London City service – using Aurigny’s own G-ORAI plane – managed to land just after 9pm on Sunday, while the leased plane G-PBOT safely touched down at 11.30pm from Manchester.

When that last flight came in, the wind had swung around to the south and still blowing at 32mph. But these flight used ATRs, which have different limits to the Titan’s Airbus 320.

Passengers caught at Gatwick were given hotel accommodation and were rebooked on other services, including some being put on London City services. Services from London airports were showing as full yesterday.

Yellow warnings for snow and ice have been issued for the south of the UK for next few days.

Today’s warning covers south-west England, including Exeter and Bristol. On Wednesday the warning covers the entire of the south of England, including Southampton and Gatwick airports. The Met Office is predicting temperatures at Gatwick will drop to minus 2C in the next few days, although with a north wind it is expected to feel like minus 6C on Thursday morning. Guernsey is expected to stay above freezing, but get colder during the week, with temperatures dropping to 3C on Thursday night.

FERRY DISRUPTION

Harbour services were severely disrupted yesterday, with all fast ferry sailings cancelled. But the Goodwill freight boat and Channel Chieftain national newspaper boat both made it in yesterday morning, and the Condor Islander ferry arrived in the last afternoon.

Travel Trident cut back to just one rotation yesterday.

Sark Shipping did two rotations, but just two people braved the early morning sailing from Guernsey to Sark.

Condor is expected to run a full schedule today.