A PLANE STORY

For a start flight AC856 was an hour and a half late landing. What do you do when you get to an airport and the flight you are meeting is late. Not late enough for you to do anything meaningful.  But 90 minutes. You can’t spend that long in one of those airport coffee bars and just have a latte, can you? Actually, that’s exactly what I did. Two lattes, and then I had that bloated feeling which either comes from too much caffein or too much milk or both.

I should have bought a magazine, I suppose, but when I walked into the newsagents but there was nothing that caught my eye. The fashion shelf? No thanks. The exhaustive computer geek offering. Not for me. ‘What Car, ‘Horse and Hound’, ‘Family Handyman’. No, no and most certainly no. I came out with car sweets because I felt obliged to buy something; you know, those ones which come in a round tin and promise a long suck, but only deliver sugar-overload.

Anyway, after an hour I just went back to the arrivals area and sat there fiddling with my phone, deleting contacts from that list that keeps growing and is full of people whom I’ve never met, and those I can no longer remember or want to be in touch with. That used up a full 15 minutes until I was almost brain dead.

I tried to look for a hotel in Santorini where we might go this summer, but the hotel review site has become so totally useless that I gave that up, too. Then I spent several minutes trying to find how much I’d now have to pay in the short stay car park. It just might have been the minimum of £6 if I had been very lucky and Claire had whooshed out in time, or early. Now it was more likely to be £20! Never mind. It would be well worth it to see her after almost a year.

And as one does, I was keeping one eye on the scrolling arrivals screen when, eventually, it showed that flight AC856 from Toronto, which had been due in at 8.30 had landed at 10.12. “Baggage in Hall” the screen read… and did so for more than an hour.

I expected Claire might have a case or seven. She’d been studying in southern California for a year and didn’t travel light at the best of times. But even so, she should have cleared immigration in less than an hour at the most. Perhaps only in minutes given that she’s got a British passport with everything about her embedded in it electronically. I calculated that she would come out of the passenger doors before 11, maybe 11.30 if there was baggage mayhem.

I had really expected that she would have texted me as soon as she got off the plane. Or even a real phone call. When it didn’t come, I had tried her number but it appeared the phone was not turned on. Flat battery perhaps. It happens.

My time calculations were wrong. No Claire… so, sometime after 12, I rang Colette at home to see if she had heard from our daughter. She had not!  By now I had been by the arrivals barrier for so long that no one else who was here when I joined the throng was still around. I should have brought my own stool and a paperback. I had not.

Being risky, but with one eye on the arrivals area, I went back to the news-stand and bought a rather nasty white-bread sandwich, a drink and an unwanted snack: their nonsensical meal-deal which costs less when you buy more.

Back at the barrier I ate half the sandwich, discarded the ‘snack’ and drank all the water. Still no Claire.

Another 40 minutes passed before I got Collette to check with the airline. Yes, Claire Desberrow had been booked on an Air Canda flight AC788 which left LA yesterday on time and, as far as they could tell, she was also due to board the connecting flight in Toronto after an hour’s “layover”. How cute! They would not confirm that she had actually made the flights “for security reasons”, but told Colette that the plane had landed in Heathrow a little more than 90 minutes later than scheduled. Colette refrained from telling them that she already knew that!

Then she tried to contact the passport and immigration people at the airport to check whether Claire had really arrived in London. So did I. Don’t try to do that is all I can say. You will find no one who can tell you anything, even on a weekday. 

You can probably guess what state I was already in when Colette rang me just after 2pm. She’d had an ‘information only’ call from someone at Heathrow. Claire was safe – but stuck in the airport ‘airside’.  All they would tell her was that they were ‘assisting Ms Desberrow resolve irregularities.’ They were unforthcoming when Collete asked what was going on. Unhelpful when I rang the airport police a few minutes later to try to get more information.

“Is my daughter, Claire Desberrow, OK?”

“Who am I talking to?”

“Her father Tony. I’m here at the airport – I am due to take her home I’m at the arrivals barrier in

Terminal 2”.

“Just a minute Sir?”

It was a very, very long minute.

“Someone has already been in contact with the family, Sir.”

“I know. I’m trying to find out more. Can I come to wherever she is at the airport to try to sort things out?

“No, Sir, you cannot”.

“Can I just see my daughter”.

“I’m afraid not, Sir”.

“Can you just give me an idea of what is going on?”

“I’m sorry, Sir.”

“Can you say how long things will take?”

“I’m sorry, Sir. Miss Desberrow’s family will be kept fully informed when there is anything else to add.”

“Is this anything to do with terrorism?”

“I’m sorry, Sir, I have to end this call now”.

“Can you just…” but the line went dead.

 

I rang Colette. We were both in a state, but she suggested I ring Alan Ellory. He’s a friend of my brother; we’ve met him several times at parties and he’s ex-police. He runs a security outfit of some type.  Alan wasn’t at home but his wife said she’d ask him to contact me. I explained that it was urgent and I was in limbo at Heathrow…

You know what it is like. You are waiting for a call. You also want to make a call – but you dare not in case the person you want to hear from tries to ring when you are on another call. I waited. That’s what I’d been doing all day so far and I was not getting any better at it! I managed twenty minutes and then rang Colette to update her. Neither of us knew what to do.

Should I just go home. Might take me more than an hour now even though it was before the worst of the rush hour. The M25 is so unpredictable. What if she came out, everything sorted out – whatever it was that needed sorting – looking for me?

I rang the police again. I explained who I was. I was now talking to quite a different person – who was equally un-forthcoming.

“All I want is for you to just let my daughter know that I am going home and when she manages to sort things out with you, to give me a ring. I’ll come back to pick her up”.  

“What was your daughter’s name, Sir?”

“Claire Desberrow”

“Just a minute, Sir.”

I held on for more than five minutes.

“I’m sorry Sir, we have no information about anyone with that name.”

“You must have. You rang my wife earlier in the day. Colette Desberrow. I’m her husband. Her number…”

“Sorry, Sir, I can’t help you.”

“Can I please speak to whoever is in charge there?”

“I’ll see if the Sergeant can ring you back, Sir. We have your number.”

“Than…”

 

I rang Colette. She had had a call from Alan. He was going to be busy for some time but he said he’d see what he could do.

I paid the parking charge – almost £70 – and drove home, hoping to hear from ‘a Sergeant’ on the way. It took me almost an hour and a half in the traffic, but no one called.

When I got home, Colette was waiting by the front door and we gave each other a firm hug and went through everything together. We had no idea why Claire was still at the airport. Why she could not call us. Why we could not talk to her. Had someone tampered with her passport? Why were the police so unhelpful and unforthcoming. The authorities had told Colette that our daughter was safe, and not unwell. She apparently had not been arrested. The caller had said nothing more.

At about 7.30 Alan rang us. He’d found out nothing of any help. Everything in the Met. was different now, he said.  There was something called a specialist operations unit at the airport but he knew no one who would be of any help. We told him what little we knew. He told us not to worry.  He might as well have told the Pope not to pray.

Colette and I sat in the kitchen throwing theories around, with scenarios which were getting less and less likely. Were we missing a simple explanation? Perhaps we couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Or was it far more serious that anyone was letting on. Why couldn’t she ring?

Just after 8.40 we got the call we had hoped for. Claire’s voice. Clear and relatively unruffled. Calling from a police station called Polar Park just off Bath Road in Harmondsworth, right next to the airport.

“Can you come for me now Dad?”

“Are you OK”.

“Yes Dad, I’m fine. I’ll tell you all about it – just come, can you?”

“As soon as I can.”

 

As we drove back to Epsom the whole story unravelled. Me and Claire in the front seats, Colette leaning forward between them to listen.  Claire had got off the Air Canada Boeing at Heathrow with her small, black carry-on rucksack, collected from where it had been the whole time, beneath her feet under the back of the seat in front.  As she went down the long walkway towards passport control, she rummaged through the bag for her phone and passport. They were not in the outer zipped pocket where she was sure they should be. Not inside the entire rucksack. Nor was her purse-wallet. She turned back, suspecting that they must somehow have slipped out during the flight and still be on the plane. Strange, though, because the zipped pocket was closed. Could someone during the night flight have taken things from her bag while she was sleeping/dozing wrapped in that airline blanket? Surely not. All she knew for sure is that she had her passport, phone and purse when she boarded the connecting flight in Toronto.

Back at the airbridge, she was not allowed back on to the plane. She showed the ground staff her boarding pass and was told that they would look on the plane for her. She waited patiently and was eventually told nothing had been found and to go to the airline transit desk. There someone rang the service crew and again told her that nothing had been found, and said she would have to go to passport control.

Arriving at an airport without a passport, money, a phone or any form of identification is not entirely helpful and she spent hours dealing with layers of officialdom, repeating her story, waiting for the slow machinery to grind in her favour. She was by no means the first to face this predicament and there was clearly an invariable routine which was adopted. Questions galore, forms to fill in. Sit and wait, more questions, more forms, more waiting in an unwelcoming secure area.

In these days of electronic information, one might have thought things might proceed at a faster pace, but perhaps because of data theft and attempts by imposters, everything needed to be checked and double checked. Actually, Claire told us that she had been warned that she might be kept overnight somewhere, and would have been if it had happened at a weekend.

She had not had anything to eat since landing and not enough to drink, either.

Despite which, when we got home, cup of instant decaf by her side, Claire spent more than an hour cancelling credit cards, talking to someone at her bank, and trying to make a list of every other card that was in her purse-wallet.

After visits to the local police station, and certified copies of her birth certificate, a replacement passport arrived after three months. The new driving licence came more quickly.

A claim against her travel insurance was declined for dubious technical reasons buried in small print.

She’s now back in southern California, completing her studies.

I have no clear idea what happened on Flight AC856, but I have read that thefts from cabin baggage are not unknown, particularly on long night flights.