Ok, I’ll be honest with you right away. There ain’t no such thing as an early arrival, not with flying at least. Have you ever been on a flight on which they announced an early arrival at destination where that actually became a reality? And with early arrival I mean at least 15-20 minutes prior to the planned arrival time… and getting out of the airport at destination of course.
Well I didn’t. It does happen quite a lot that a flight – especially return flights from the US to Europe in my case – are shorter than planned. But since that only makes up for all the time you lost at departure to begin with that doesn’t really count does it. You’re just on time, and still that depends on how much time you lost in the first place.
Occasionally you didn’t lose time at departure and the flight is shorter than scheduled. Hooray, that makes us all happy, so what happens next? Depends on the airport I guess. Last time I flew to London City Airport we were 10 minutes early, and since that’s on a 50 minutes flight I count that as a decent early arrival. Given the early arrival, our gate wasn’t ready yet for un-boarding so we remained on the tarmac until they were able to get that one and only bus at LCY to come and pick us up. You catch my drift, by the time we got out of the airport we were later instead of sooner.
Same happened at the Brussels Airport, can’t remember where I came from – think it was Munich. We arrived too soon, but it was raining like hell when we arrived and all departures where delayed until further notice. Result, no free gate, wait for the bus, etc etc. Ugly little detail. One guy saw his luggage laying on the tarmac, in the poring rain… I guess they unloaded that a bit too quickly there. To make it even worse, that was a non-plastic one so it’s fair to say all contents were ‘damaged goods’ by now.
Anyway, let me know if you don’t agree – but I’m saying there’s no such thing as an early arrival.
Kris Hoet
missbelgium
passitalong
servantofchaos
geertd
charlesfrith