Travel chaos and understaffed airports are a wake-up call: Britain is unravelling
We made it home from holiday, eventually, on the third day of trying. Not bad, really, by the standards of this hellish summer. Better than being stuck for 21 hours in traffic outside Dover with a screaming toddler in the back and no loo for miles. Or sitting on the asphalt for six hours in a heatwave without food or drink, as the inmates of one American Airlines flight to New York reportedly were this week. At least I wasn’t missing a wedding or a funeral, or even (like one despairing passenger on what was meant to be our flight home) trying and failing to get back for a sister’s graduation.
All we had to contend with was a flurry of last-minute changes to our tickets, followed by someone else’s plane breaking down on a runway in New Jersey and triggering a now woefully familiar chain reaction: delayed takeoffs, jumbo jets queueing on the tarmac unable to offload increasingly stressed passengers at the gates, a missed connection, a day and a night unexpectedly stuck at Newark airport. There’s only so much time you can kill boggling at the Donald Trump “I’ll be back!” T-shirts and Kamala Harris commemorative socks on sale in the airport gift shop.
Still, we managed to get on to another flight the next evening, which was airborne for one hopeful hour before starting to leak hydraulic fluid somewhere over Canada, prompting a scramble back to Newark and a runway lined with emergency vehicles. The rest, to be honest, is a blur. After more than 48 hours in transit everything takes on a faintly dreamlike quality, fogged by living on a diet of airline snacks and never being sure what time it is in real life.
Travel chaos is the ultimate in first-world problems, of course, confined to those lucky enough to afford a holiday. But if
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