Never made sense why once it was archived they wanted the form, yet gave us and Customs access to the reservation system with our own terminal.

I can only imagine that they got advice that when it was live it was processed for one purpose, with permission including your access. When it was archived, it was held for a different purpose, therefore the permission had lapsed and you'd have to request it under the detection or prevention exception.

I agree, but desperate times call for desperate measures? KBGR is on the MAJOR ferry route to Europe.

thinking about it, he might have more luck trying to fly into the portland jetport and coaching over to bangor because there's slim pickings to either airport, but more internal connections out of portland, though that's not cheap place to fly into...

Or get to the coast and either find a berth (or stow away) on a freighter.

Or do the math and work out how many hand jobs equals a ticket home

that'll be one sticky cargo container

Shhhh! We'll get into trouble for being horrible. Again.

Was that before electronic ticketing?

OP, I'm feeling generous, because it's Christmas.

PM me your full passport name, dob and I will buy your ticket back. You can pay me when you're back in the UK. I'll get you a ticket on departure so it doesn't need to be posted etc. Can I rely on you to get to the airport?

How does that sound?

Good Lord! That sounds very generous. So generous, indeed that I'm sure Cindy will forgive me for suggesting that you buy a round trip ticket with a Saturday night stay and tell the OP to throw the return portion away once he gets home.

Yes, throw away can bite you in the ass, but it's not like he's going to be flying TATL any time soon is it?

Edited to add: How many hand jobs are you looking for?

Yes, but roundtrip not necessarily cheaper w/o AP. Pity we didn't have a bit more time, could likely get him a cheap one way through wholesaler.

How incredibly nice of you.

Just a thought - did anyone send him a PM or an email - not sure how often he checks this thread, considering...

The British embassy will pay for it, the robbing bastards add about 70 €`s on the abroad renewal application price to pay for Brits repatriation.
Mine cost me twice what it would of been in the UK.

The ability to recover archived ticket details by searching a computer came about after 9/11. Both BA and Virgin and to a lesser extent BMI changed over to an electronic archive instead of a paper one. They also made it much easier to search for either a current or archived booking as well.

Prior to that with BA if you wanted to get details from an old booking you were just at likely to end up at their storage facility in Ruislip searching through the ticket stubs looking for the one you wanted.

Not sure that's the whole story, though. I think it's equally fair to say that much of the impetus for e-ticketing was commercial. With old paper tickets, you held the ticket in your hand. This was empowering - eg you could walk over to another airline, hand them the ticket and ask them to endorse it across. Doing your own 240, in effect.

With e-tickets, the actual ticket only exists in the airline's system, so any such things are in their gift alone.