It's not a smart decision, and the Gatwick bigwigs would have been hopping mad. But if one of your customers want to bring their plane back to your airport, you let em, then hopefully work with them to clear your runway asap. The airline don't care about your airport. All they care about is getting their plane and passengers back to where they can be serviced as quickly as possible.

Better to block Gatwick than the arrivals runway at Heathrow - but I do see what you're seeing Pulaski. I guess the point is that if it lands at a military base, then the parts and people to fix it have to be shipped there - what is Virgin supposed to do? Keep a stockpile at every base in the UK 'just in case'?

I believe that Britain has those things we call "roads".

My point, not clearly spelled out, is that in landing that plane at Gatwick, Virgin's problems were significantly reduced at the expense of inconvenience to, including knock-on effects, hundreds of flights and thousands of passengers of other airlines.

Any current/ex Boscombe Down people in here? I noticed it mentioned in this thread a couple of years ago! Happy new year to all.

Dave2726

Yep. To which they don't care.
We used to get on average 1 aircraft with hydraulic failure return to Heathrow a month. Normally, due to their numbers, it was BA. Hydraulic failure usually meant an aircraft unable to vacate the runway due to nose wheel steering failure. That aircraft would sit there until BA sent a team out to tow it off. We would put massive pressure on em to get a team out there so that we could hand the runway back to ATC, but despite the fact BA would inevitably suffer most from the delays, an alternative airport would never be entertained. In fact they wouldn't even rush to remove the aircraft. As for the passengers caught up in the resultant delays, would they be told the reason for the delays, or that one of the other aircraft owned by the company they were flying with had caused the problems? Of course not! It wouldbe down to ATC restrictions (which technically, it was LOL).

You surprise me.

.... Isn't it time that major airports, ones with huge flight congestion issues, run their own removal operations, at least to the point that the plane is towed out of harms way? ..... Comparable to the standby breakdown trucks in major roadworks in the UK, because it is in everyone's interest to keep traffic moving.

Can fly in maintenance or have them drive to another airport. I worked in San Diego which is single runway and busiest single runway in the US, and on the rare occasion an aircraft needed to return for something such as this and couldn't make it to LAX, landing at one of the 2 military bases was not unheard of, the airline just drove up maintenance to deal with it.

But with the way the runway is set up in San Diego, most pilots don't want to land there with an issue when there are better runways nearby at the military bases, but generally they just went to LAX when there was an issue.

I believe Chicago Midway has that honour. The Craphole that it is.

Midway isn't single runway.

Facility Data

To my knowledge San Diego still holds the title of busiest single runway commercial airport in the US.

The airport still say's they are anyhow.

San Diego International Airport > Education > History

Personally I am amazed they can handle an average of 515 flights per day from such a small facility, but they have no other choice, so have to work with what they have.

Although 777's, 747's, 787's look funny when on the ground since the airport is so small overall.

Now what they are going to do with the old outdated terminal 1 and Southwest airlines in the coming years will be interesting. The terminal is old, cramped and not designed for today's level of activity.

That wouldn't happen in the UK. We had an incident in terminal 4 a couple of months before terminal 5 opened. Terminal 4 was soon full. BA wouldn't park their planes in a different terminal let alone at a different airport.

The airlines voluntarily did it in San Diego, pilots don't want to deal with a relatively short runway with terrain issues on both ends of the runway when having an issue.

It didn't happen very often however, most of the time they just go to LAX or ONT and sometimes PHX.

Every airport in the US is different as to how gates and space is allocated, some are common use and basically first come first served, and others the airlines have long term leases on the space, but generally US airlines cooperate with one another and play nice when someone needs an extra gate or space.

Can't even count how many times I had to call Delta or American and ask to use one of their gates since we only had 2 and sometimes had 3 planes, worst case scenario, we stopped the the 3rd plane in the alley, and towed them in and parked them in between the other 2 gates and planes and used air stairs.

Of course if one of those airlines needed a gate (which was rare as both had more gates then they actually needed at the time) we would let them use ours if it was free and would not affect our flights.

When I worked at O'hare American was my savior when I had delayed or cancelled flights, I probably called them a hundred times a month for seats to somewhere....

United seems to be having some issues in Denver with the change over of ground handling from Skywest to another vendor for their United Express flights.

Tipster: United's new baggage handling vendor leaving many bags on tarmac overnight at DIA - 7NEWS Denver TheDenverChannel.com

As far as I know the United mainline flights are still handled by United employees.

AirAsia Flight QZ8501: 40 bodies recovered by search teams - World - CBC News

That is very sad, but not unexpected.

Another Air Asia A320 involved in incident;

AirAsia plane overshoots Philippines runway forcing passengers to use emergency slide | Daily Mail Online