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My daughter and I were flying from Glasgow to LCY on 30th July when the national radar outage closed London airspace. I fully accept this is one of the “outside out control” reasons that would be used to disallow a EU261 claim. However, our situation is a little more complicated.
We left GLA at 2.55pm (on time), scheduled to land at LCY at 4.20pm. After taking off, we circled around the border for about half an hour, then retuned to GLA, landing around 4.15pm. We were told to wait in the lounge for updates. About 45 mins later, we were told the plane had a maintenance issue and had to be taken out of service, meaning it couldn’t attempt to complete its route. The flight was therefore formally cancelled and we were booked on a 7.35pm flight to LHR.
This then left around an hour late, meaning we landed at LHR about 21.35 (and only boarded the bus for a 10 min ride to the terminal at 10pm).
Do I have grounds for an EU 261 claim given the tech issues and delays?
(Per BA – no, they’ve refused my initial claim quoting the national radar incident, despite me setting out all of the above and stating it’s the tech and delays providing the grounds I’m claiming for).
TIA!
My feeling is that I would push back on this one. Your flight was cancelled due to a technical issue with the plane and whatever went before has no relevance IMO.
I had a similar scenario last year when the plane went tech after boarding had completed we had to wait for a later re-routing. BA paid up with no quibble. I’m wondering if their AI system just latched on to the earlier incident as the default response in your case.
Other readers may have other views, however!
Agreed – definitely push back. There is a poor argument that the wider outage caused the plane to return and therefore notwithstanding everything else that is the reason you were delayed. There is another poor argument that notwithstanding the cancellation your delay wasn’t more than 3 hours later than it would have been given the outage. I’d hope neither argument is successful.
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