No wonder why Virgin Atlantic’s top boss prefers a hot air balloon.
Passengers aboard a problem-plagued London to Newark flight on adventurer Sir Richard Branson’s trademark airline spent over four hellish hours stuck on a Connecticut tarmac with little water, no air conditioning and no information into the wee hours today.
“There were a lot of screaming babies, and a lot of unhappy people. People were getting out of control,” said Julie Engle, 18, a senior who nearly missed her graduation from Egg Harbor Township High in New Jersey.
It was a misadventure that would have intimidated even Branson himself.
Thunderstorms forced the plane from landing in Newark to Connecticut’s Bradley International Airport, but oddly, the FAA couldn’t confirm any other flights that had to be re-routed.
Once on the tarmac at around 8:20 p.m. Tuesday the misery really began, passengers said.
Several passengers had to me removed by ambulance as they sweltered in the dark, 108-degree cabin even as airline staff infuriatingly kept saying it would just be another five minutes before the plane would leave the small town airport for Newark.
“They kept making up lie after lie to calm people down, but it just made people more angry,” said Engle, who’d been in the UK for a rowing tournament. “They said: the ground unit caught fire, the pilot had been awake for too many hours, they put fuel in the wrong tank.”
Compounding the confusion was the utter lack of any facilities at the backwater Bradley International Airport that had lacked the Customs and Border Protection personnel to process the travelers – or even let them wait out the fiasco in the terminal.
The delays lasted for so long that eventually Virgin’s pilot wasn’t legally allowed fly the plane anymore because of regulations limiting hours in the cockpit without rest.
“It was like a microcosm of Katrina — being stuck in a place with no food or water and no organization,” New York-based travel writer Paul Rubio, who was on the flight. “There was no clear leader or someone who could manage the situation. It was complete chaos.”
Federal Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood ordered an investigation into the incident, but new regulations that fine airlines for forcing passengers to linger on the tarmac only apply to domestic carries.
The problems started Tuesday afternoon at Heathrow Airport when the air conditioner on the Airbus A340-600 gave out before boarding even began.
Once the delayed flight took off it was smooth sailing until it approached Newark when it was diverted to Hartford, Conn.
After four hours on the tarmac in Hartford they finally disembarked at 1 a.m., but the two immigration officers didn’t finish processing them until after 3 a.m. and some passengers didn’t get a shuttle bus to Newark until 11 a.m., Virgin said.
In a statement Virgin “apologized for any inconvenience.”