Delayed - a photo on Flickriver

Delayed

            It was only when I overheard a telephone conversation on the way to our gate that I realised we were going to be delayed again.  Last year it was patently obvious that we were going nowhere in a hurry as a blizzard engulfed Bristol Airport.  This time the reasons were unclear, but as airlines do, they boarded us at the scheduled time, even though we’d just been told we’d be leaving an hour and twenty-five minutes late.  We settled into our seats, shrugged and switched on our kindles.  There was little else to do but wait patiently. 

To say the man in the row behind us was getting irritable would be an understatement.  To say he was fast becoming an irritation was also a bare representation of the facts as they stood.  “Useless!  Why have they boarded us if we can’t take off?  We’ll probably have to get on another plane at this rate.”  And so the one man tirade went on.  A passing flight attendant was harangued on the subject of why we weren't receiving updates. Which I felt was odd, because the pilot had already made a number of them over the PA system. Perhaps his Royal Stroppiness wanted a minute by minute analysis.  By now, we’d been sitting on the same spot on the tarmac for more than two hours, and while we were all feeling decidedly frustrated, the grumpy crusader in row twenty-two really wasn’t helping the mood.  Firstly we’d been delayed because a member of the cabin crew had been taken unwell, and just when the emergency replacement had made it through airport security and been raced onto the plane, another problem arose in the form of a warning light in the cockpit.  You know when that orange light appears on your dashboard and you think to yourself, “I really must get that seen to?”  Well when you’re about to proceed at thirty-seven thousand feet for the best part of four hours, it really needs seeing to straightaway.  An engineer was called. These things happen from time to time. 

“Engineers!  Pah! What do they know?” grumbled Mr Moan.  “Absolutely nothing!”  For a moment I thought he was going to sing “say it again” in an homage to Edwin Starr, but instead he expanded the subject of his rant.  “Doctors!  They don’t know anything either!  Useless, the lot of ‘em!”  The other passengers around us glanced at each other in a mixture of dismay and amusement.  Was a doctor going to fly the plane?  He might need the services of a doctor quite soon if this carried on.  I was already considering whether to bring my 100-400 out of the bag and repurpose it over the top of his whining head.  Would I be thrown off the plane or applauded by everyone else on board?  Throughout the episode his wife sat next to him, smiling benignly.  After four or five decades of this she’d probably either got used to it or gone deaf and decided not to see a doctor about it.  Maybe she’d told him the doctor couldn’t fix it.

As the minutes ticked on, I decided to do a bit of online investigation to remind myself what our rights were.  Evidently I wasn’t alone.  I’d only typed “EU F….” into the search bar and Google knew what I was looking for.  Three hours was the magic deadline for delayed flight compensation to kick in.  The young woman in the row in front of us was looking hopeful.  “We might as well be three hours late now,” she decided.  “It’ll pay for half of the next holiday.”  Lord Grump had by now gone temporarily silent as he realised the general tardiness of the day might deliver a cash bonus.  I didn’t bother telling him that I'd just read the three hours thing was about how late you arrived at your destination, and given that the expected flying time would have made us nearly half an hour early under normal circumstances, we were still very unlikely to be hearing the sound of pound notes arriving in our bank accounts.  At least he was quiet for a while.

Eventually, after sitting in this metal tube with almost two hundred other increasingly testy souls for more than three and a half hours, we were off.  It was just after 1pm, more than three hours after the scheduled departure.  No doubt someone holding the purse strings had urged them to get a move on before all of the operator’s profits on this jaunt and more were lost.

I’ve never spent seven and a half hours on a plane before, but by now I was half expecting us to land and open the doors to a wall of heat in a distant land where they race camels and small wiry men in keffiyehs converse in Arabic and drink mint tea from thimbles.  But no, this was definitely Fuerteventura as I remembered it, the rugged lunar brown landscape rising from a glittering blue sea.  Behind me, a voice murmured a scathing judgement on the subject of the latest cabin crew announcement.  Maybe he should have offered to fly the plane himself.  I just hoped he wasn’t going to the same resort as us.  We landed at ten to five, just ten minutes short of the compensation hour.  Funny that.  

An hour or so later, in our rented Fiat Panda, we pulled up at our home for the next three weeks, and immediately went out through the back door to drink in the last of the evening sun.  We were late again, but we were here.  And there really wasn’t anything to complain about in that.

Taken in: Spain / Canary Islands / Oliva, La / Corralejo (show map)

Taken on: February 24, 2024

Tags:

Fuerteventura

volcano

volcanic

landscape

landscape photography

glow

Canary

Island

Canary Islands

canarias

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islas

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malpais

Spain

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delayed

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Sets appears in: • Fuerteventura 2024

Groups appears in: • Landscape photography • Amateur Landscape more » • Flickr Social Club • Photography Week • Amateur Photographer Magazine • Flickr Social « less

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV, f/11.0, 1/10 sec, 28mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
Lens:	EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM
Aperture:	f/11.0
Exposure Time:	0.1 sec (1/10)
Focal Length:	28mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	+2/3 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 13.1 (Macintosh)
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