Flying and Delays

As I write this post I am in Heathrow Airport waiting for my final connection to Copenhagen. It is currently 1 hour and 10 minutes delayed. I need to catch a train with a connection to Ærø at 4.40 pm. Expected arrival in Copenhagen is presently 4.25 pm. The alternative is a three hour wait for the next scheduled ferry.

There have been several delays during my roundtrip to Cayman - more than I’m normally accustomed too. My flight out of Copenhagen (to London) was delayed an hour. Add to that an hour to find our luggage which had mysteriously disappeared. With the shuttle service closed for the day, a taxi was the only transportation option. However, with a massive queue outside Terminal 3 and one taxi arriving every 2-3 minutes, I faced the prospect of waiting more than an hour. I decided to try Terminal 2. Luckily, the queue there was much smaller and within 10 minutes I was on my way to the hotel. I arrived a quarter past midnight - delayed two and half hours and utterly wasted.

It is surprising that a large international airport like Heathrow is not better equipped to deal with transport issues late at night. The Heathrow express does operate at this hour, but is not very helpful if you are going to hotel in the vicinity of Heathrow. The key lesson to learn is either to avoid Heathrow after 10.30 pm or find a hotel at the end of the Heathrow Express line. And if you find yourself in a massive taxi queue try one of the other terminals.

The flight out of Heathrow the next morning to Cayman (via Nassau) was also delayed, although with no real consequence as Cayman was my final destination. Leaving Cayman yesterday morning, however, was different story. I was still trying to check-in when my flight was scheduled to depart. Technical difficulties at the check-in counter made turnaround impossibly slow. Nevertheless, we managed to make up most of the time before our arrival at Heathrow. With an ongoing connection to Copenhagen I was of course very pleased with this development. However, my excitement was short lived. Upon landing at Heathrow we were unable to taxi to our gate because of traffic on the ground. By the time I stepped out of the plane I only had 25 minutes to reach my Copenhagen flight. Sprinting to Terminal 4, I managed to make the gate 10 minutes prior to scheduled departure, only to find, as noted above, that the plane was delayed.

All in all, you can’t claim I have been lucky in my travels this time around (although I did travel on the 7th of the 7th month of 2007).

UPDATE: To add further dissatisfaction, my luggage did not arrive at Copenhagen airport. I will have to wait a few days before they find it (I hope) and send it to me. In addition, the plane did not land before 5 pm, so I am forced to take the last ferry arriving at midnight instead of 9 pm.