In my experience, commercial air travel involves an aeroplane. Air South West however seem to disagree, preferring to deliver their passengers by road. Instead of being www.airsouthwest.com, perhaps they should be www.taxisouthwest.com.
Last Monday I travelled home from a computer conference in Holland, arriving in Bristol airport at 4pm. I then waited around the airport for the next 4 hours for my flight from Bristol to Plymouth scheduled for 2020. At precisely 2000 I was called by name to a departure gate along with one other chap. “Great”, I thought, “Soon be home now”. Wrong. We were called to the departure gate to be informed that our flight to Plymouth was cancelled due to adverse weather. Strange, the weather in Bristol was very nice at the time. A quick phone call by my would-be flight partner to his wife in Plymouth confirmed clear blue skies there too.
A few more enquiries whilst waiting for our baggage to be exhumed from the bowels of the airport reveal that the cancellation isn’t due to the weather after all, it’s a technical fault with the plane. Oh well, that’s good news as we can now catch the plane to Newquay instead. That Air South West flight is scheduled for the same time, lucky us! Wrong again. It seems the flight to Newquay is also cancelled as the plane has gone to Bradford instead. This took me so much by surprise that I never did find out why it should be going to Bradford.
Of course this is all a complete load of hogwash, the flights were cancelled because they didn’t want to operate a flight to Plymouth for only two people. I can only speculate about the Newquay flight but suspect there was nobody booked on that one at all. So why do Air South West have to lie to us and why also did they leave us sitting around for 4 hours after check-in before telling us it wasn’t going to happen? Turns out that my companion for the flight tries to use it frequently and more often than not ends up coming home in a taxi.