The Day of the Drone - Luton to the Rescue

The Day of the Drone - Luton to the Rescue

During my elongated stay at Sofia airport I was kept informed of the situation at Gatwick by my sister Beverley. Courtesy of the miracle of modern technology I received news updates throughout the day, each telling me exactly the same as the previous one. Somebody had seen a drone hovering above a perimeter fence but nobody knew who the witness was. There was no video footage. Nobody knew what had happened or what was likely to happen. An untold number of sources demonstrated that they had more than one way of telling me that I was going absolutely nowhere. I had sensed this early on in the agonising wait and just wanted the powers-that-be in EasyJet’s fake marble corridors to tell us straight and put us all out of our misery so that I could just go home to my incontinent cat, put the kettle on, forget all about the wonderful family Christmas that I had been looking forward to for seven months, and sob uncontrollably.

Meanwhile news was coming through via other passengers that taxi drivers were charging four or five times the going rate where people had made alternative arrangements, flown to other British airports and then needed transport back to Gatwick to hook up with their families, friends, cars and onward travel arrangements. It wasn’t just my little orange EasyJet plane that was affected. Hundreds of flights to and from airports all over the world had been cancelled or diverted. The place I was hoping to get to had apparently taken on the appearance of a refugee camp complete with food shortages and masses of people sleeping on floors. Kate Adie was on her way and Bob Geldof was writing a Christmas song. Despite my own gloomy circumstances, I had to consider myself lucky.   

Eventually and inevitably, the word in the right-hand column on the departures board changed from ‘delayed’ to ‘cancelled’, my heart sank into my boots and simultaneously I received a text message from EasyJet telling me that I should think about going home to start the sobbing process. They suggested giving me a full refund or putting me in a Sofia hotel for up to two nights, at their expense, which would give them time to find me a seat on another flight to somewhere in Britain. My opinion of this much-maligned airline rose considerably over the course of the fiasco. But I went for their first option.

Overcome by a wave of utter dejection, I sent Beverley a message. Hampshire we have a problem! The mission had been aborted and I would try again next Christmas. Another year of keeping that secret lay ahead of us. I dragged myself along the rarely used draughty corridor that led directly from the departure lounge to the arrivals hall to show my passport to a border police officer, even though I hadn’t actually left the country. Aware of the situation he looked at me, slowly shook his head and did a sad face… in Bulgarian. Then I collected my trusty bag from the luggage carousel, even though it hadn’t actually been loaded into an aircraft. It seemed to have trebled in weight in the hours that we’d been apart. Over the years we had had many travel adventures together and I think it knew that this wasn’t one of the happier ones.

With so few people around I was soon outside searching for a taxi to take me to the bus station in the centre of Sofia, from where I would catch a bus home. It was bitterly cold, snow was settling on the piles of bulldozed ice left over from previous days’ blizzards and there were no yellow cabs waiting at the rank which was usually gridlocked with them. Where was Emil when I needed him? Probably sunning himself on a beach with a dozen other passengers he’d given lifts and phone numbers to that day. Or maybe he was ferrying people from Newcastle airport to Gatwick at £2,000 a shot. I felt like I was hurtling towards the bottom of an abyss of misery. Well I would have been but there was no transport to take me there. At least the fog had cleared.

Luckily, as far as my journey was concerned, only Beverley and I were disappointed. Because we had been so successful at keeping the secret, nobody else in England had been expecting me. I suppose there may have been some people in Bulgaria who felt a bit let down as they had known I was leaving the country and were probably looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet over a festive period with me not there.

All I could do to cheer myself was to return to the departures building and have a cup of lukewarm coffee from a vending machine and watch hundreds more passengers excitedly going off on their Christmas breaks via other non-Gatwick destinations. My envy of these disgustingly happy people had me as green as the middle horizontal stripe on the Bulgarian flag. This was the only time I’ve ever wanted to be somewhere else whilst being in Bulgaria.

As soon as I had got in from the snow, from the corner of my eye I saw a queue. I assumed it was for the coffee machine as they are unbelievably popular in these parts, providing a solution to any difficulty that may crop up. I found to my dismay that there isn’t such a machine in the departures building at Terminal One and the café had already closed because the final flight of the day was about to depart. Although on a much smaller scale, this was another catastrophe, at least until it dawned on me that the line of people in front of me were trying to buy airline tickets from a sales desk that I had never noticed before.

Suddenly there was a glimmer of hope! I sent a message to Beverley and she had a glimmer too. She keeps it in a Tupperware box in her fridge to show people. I didn’t have to wait long as many of the people ahead of me seemed to be turning away from the desk with looks of disappointment on their faces within seconds of getting there. Much sooner than anticipated, I was face to face with a young uniformed woman who told me she could get me on a flight the following morning with a different airline, to a different airport, for a much different price to what I had originally paid.

I doubt if anybody in the world has ever before been totally overcome with joy at the news that they would be going to Luton, but I certainly was at that moment. It’s incredible how happiness can be so much more intense when it comes soon after moments of great despair. I wanted to jump over the counter and hug all the ticket office staff. I wanted to run topless round the departure building’s foyer, swirling my shirt above my head in celebration whilst singing ‘Olé! Olé! Olé! Olé!’ I later learnt from a fellow delayed passenger that I had bought one of the last two tickets remaining for that flight and that he had bought the other. The disconsolate people I had seen walking away in front of me had all been in groups needing more than two tickets. Phew! 

So I had a Wizzair ticket, a hole in my bank balance big enough to land an Airbus A320 in, and instructions to be at the check-in for the Luton flight at four o’clock the following morning. What more could a boy want? I also managed, by the skin of my teeth as the shop lady was trying to lock up, to procure a couple of cans of celebratory Bulgarian beer and a celebratory curly cheese sandwich. By the time the delay dust had settled it was almost ten o’clock in the evening. There was little point wandering out into the snow in search of a hotel or a better sandwich, so I found an uncomfortable seat in a draughty corridor and settled down for the night.

I slept little more than an hour on account of the hardness of the plastic seat, the snoring from my airport terminal bedfellows, and the fear of not waking up in time for my flight. The ‘smart procedure for going through security’ video played on a constant loop throughout the night. The monotonous voice of a man speaking alternately in English and Bulgarian irritated and the accompanying music sounded a little like the song ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure but had no lulling effects on me at all. Every time my eyelids grew heavy this ninety-second-long film soundtrack would gnaw at my weary brain as if air travel demons were throwing at me absolutely everything they had to push me over an edge that I’d been teetering on all day.

Other non-sleeping, drone-based delay victims wandered outside at regular intervals to smoke cigarettes. Each time they exited or entered the building the automatic sliding glass doors would stay open for thirty seconds or more, allowing significant quantities of the latest blizzard to blow into an already freezing encampment. It was the perfect location for a remake of the classic 1948 adventure film, Scott of the Antarctic. At least Captain Scott’s team, although doomed, had been able to make themselves a nice cup of tea.

Not many people know this but Sofia is Europe’s highest capital city and consequently renowned for the bitterness of its winters. This interesting fact hadn’t been mentioned in the brochure a couple of years earlier when I was looking for a foreign country to emigrate to. But the place I chose to live is much nearer to sea level, so it doesn’t usually matter.

With two hours to go until check-in time I decided to take steps to alleviate the discomfort, the cold and the boredom by walking back and forth across the vast expanses of empty floor and counting the tiles as I went. There were 9,802, excluding the ones that had been cut to fit around fixtures, fittings, inadequate heating appliances and the frozen remains of passengers.

Four o’clock came, I met the requirements of check-in, security and passport officials without any difficulty and the rest of the day went perfectly well. The plane took off bang on time, with passengers applauding as the wheels left the runway in the same way that they often do when an aircraft safely touches down. We arrived punctually at our destination to see the winter sun rise above the Luton skyline, illuminating the city to show it in all its majestic splendour. It was the twenty-first of December and a winter solstice that I would never forget.

Safely installed on English soil, I made my way to the railway station and squeezed myself onto a packed train bound for London. An hour and a half later I was rattling around on another almost empty one heading out to where my sister lives in Hampshire. Adding insult to injury, this second train filled up when it stopped at Gatwick. Carriages were soon flooded with airline passengers who had arrived there in the hour or two since the airport had reopened. Only eighteen hours behind schedule, my plan was to spend a couple of days with Beverley and the mother before making the long rail journey up to Stockport to meet up with the North of England contingent of the clan Ó Maoláin for Yuletide shenanigans.

From the day of inception of my plan, I had been a little concerned that my family might all try to surprise me by arriving unannounced at my front door in Malki Chiflik at the same time that I would be knocking on theirs. However, it turned out that such worry had been unfounded and on Christmas Eve I was greeted by shrieks and even tears when I appeared totally unexpected on a Greater Manchester doorstep. My kids have always greeted me with shrieks and tears, but they love me really.

My story has a happy ending but that wasn’t the case for everybody. On 21st December 2018, a couple of drone enthusiasts from Crawley, less than two miles from Gatwick Airport, were arrested on suspicion of dangerously disrupting civil aviation. Two days later they were eliminated from the investigation and released without charge, having been questioned for almost thirty-six hours. During that time their names and photographs were published by numerous media outlets. Their names had been disclosed by the local Conservative Member of Parliament, Henry Smith, but not by the police. Upon their release the couple said they felt ‘completely violated’. The front page headlines of tabloid newspapers had contained words that were savagely hurtful and completely untrue, and which could only be described as sensationalism. Following their release, no further arrests were made. A year after the incident, an air traffic expert and a drone instructor told the BBC that it was most likely that the ‘drone’ had in fact been a bird, a plastic bag, a helium balloon or a paper Chinese lantern. In June 2020, Sussex Police paid them £200,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

Image: Luton in December. Actually it might be Trinidad. I always get them mixed up. It’s definitely my own photograph though.

Part One:

The Day of the Drone - Gatwick Misery

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