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- Hacker News
- Uh oh. For those of us with a connection through Heathrow morning of the 10th (in about 36 hours) what would you recommend?by gausswho
- There's really very little you can do bar booking an alternative flight at great expense. If you're lucky and you know the delay in advance, at least you may have a chance to take the Elizabeth Line into town and go for a stroll. I'd count a fat hour to go from the terminal to, say, Paddington. It's a pretty area and there are excellent Persian restaurants around.by lores
- This brings up the ol' ATC government ran vs privatization debateby PowPow619
- Then the nonsense is quickly put back in its place.by edoceo
- Wonder if any of this code was outsourced to India 'cut costs'by small_model
- ofc this is downvoted on this site (by Indians and naive white western people)
Sweden has changed so much in only 15-20 years, I can remember what it was like and I weep.
- Following neoliberal economic strategy has optimized for profit maxing over basic quality of life, let alone competency of building and operating complex systems. While the US is #1 in the trend, the UK is following pretty closelyby dv_dt
- Don't browse HN after watching Slow horses...by Hodgewocket
- IT sector in the UK is bargain basement. Most competent people left for countries where their talents are valued or retired.by varispeed
- It's fine for fintech etc, but air traffic control software yes I imagine not so much.
Likely either outsourced or done by people who are comically underpaid considering how important it is
by ifwinterco - Currently stuck at an airport in london. It's insane how little information the staff here has. Also mindboggling that in aviation, where everything has a backup or two there seems to be a single company with a single software that can take down an entire airspace which most like will create worldwide ripple for the next days.by tom1337
- It’s an absolute clown show that it was down for 4 hours, but would you want to be flying in some of the busiest airspace in the world on a “backup” ATC system that isn’t normally used?
Personally I would not
by ifwinterco - Including mine. I'm not angry because my flight was cancelled. It's a pain in the arse but what really infuriates me is the "We are terribly sorry" these PR releases give. I've been on hold for three hours with British Airlines and it's "we are sorry", no you're not.
"We are truly sorry for the ongoing flight disruption" is what infuriates the situation; when words have no meaning behind the phase. Pixelated hold-music I am sure is designed to make you rage further.
by doublerabbit - Do you expect them to employ enough staff to answer passenger calls for this rare occasion? That is not good business.by ktallett
- Why wouldn’t they be sorry? It’s bad for them tooby mcmcmc
- "Sorry for any inconvenience"
What do you mean, it's ALL inconvenient!
by bcraven - What would you prefer they say?by SoftTalker
- What do you want them to say? It's an ATC issue. The airline don't know when it'll be fixed and can't do much until it is.by basisword
- My wife is currently at Gatwick, supposed to have taken off 2 hours ago, but no update.... The frustrating thing is the complete lack of information. I cannot comprehend how nobody knows what the situation is. I mean, is aircraft on the tarmac yet? Has it left it's previous destination yet? etc.
Worst part is, likely no compensation as it isn't the airlines "fault".
by Daviey - People will be angry regardless of what they say, some if they say they're sorry, some if they don't say they're sorry. Regardless of what they say, some set of people or another is going to come out and be angry about it.
What do you hope to accomplish with the phone call?
Failures happen, does it make a difference if there's someone in charge feeling a strong emotion about it? Do the call center staff have to feel genuine guilt as if their mediocre job somehow made them personally responsible?
Being angry is just as useless as faking being sorry, all they're doing is acknowledging a screwup in an automated message. Give them a break.
- Whenever a company communicates how "sorry" they are, I can't help but think about South Park[1].by ryandrake
- This affected flights going to the UK as well.
Source: Me, stuck in an airport, having witnessed numerous flights destined to London canceled throughout the day.
- Just had to cancel my 10-year passport renewal appointment for tomorrow morning, since it's in London and I'm in the EU. Man, this was a *miserable* way to spend a day. The flight kept getting bumped, heading for certain cancellation (it came, about midnight, long after I had returned from the airport); GPT was incredibly helpful on how to redeem (most of) the shit-ton of money I had paid for a 4-hour passport renewal appointment, and what my rights and obligations were in this situation.
In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport. So when the next update said that the flight had been bumped 9 hours, I had all I needed to secure that and went home. Two hours later, the app announced the flight was cancelled.
Sometimes (really a lot) I want to kick GPT's/Claude's/Gemini's collective rear ends. And then there are times like these, when, with me in a funk, AI cuts straight through to the essential knowledge I need and lowers the temperature.
by Hard_Space - > In particular it pointed me to authority docs declaring that if a flight is 5+ hours late, you can refuse to fly, reclaim the money and exit the airport.
What jurisdiction? EU? (I would love for that to be true in the US, but I bet it isn't...)
by AnimalMuppet - For anyone stranded, read up on UK261/EU261 and your airlines application process to be reimbursed. As far as I’m aware it’s not likely to happen automatically, you need to initiate the process (and record audio/video just in case proof is needed)by illwrks
- Eh, I tried in 2017 with BA when their system went down and received nothing. There was magically a Black Lives Matter protest at Gatwick (or maybe LCY, can’t remember) on the same day, which isn’t covered apparently.by junofan
- You won't get compensation for ATC issues, but you will be reimbursed.by ktallett
- NATS - the same system that crashed in August 2023 [1] due to an id clash, causing 2000 flights to be cancelled and days of chaos.by dtf
- I briefly thought you meant the issue was NATS - https://docs.nats.io/learn/core-natsby 8by3