About 45 minutes or so before we were due to come in to land, the Co-pilot came on the line and said, “We will be landing in 40 minutes. However, I'm sure you understand that the Heathrow air-traffic can be quite busy. We'll be landing in 40 minutes, if we're fortunate. 40 minutes "til landing. Cabin Crew, landing in 40 minutes. 40 minutes until landing.”
I was a bit suspicious, even then, that the Co-pilot may have known a bit more about how long our wait would be. I think he may have said “40 minutes until landing,” just three or four times to many for it to be believable.
When, with tiresome predictability, we arrived at Heathrow to be told the usual “We"ll just spend 5 or 10 minutes waiting in the stacks” it seemed likely that our stay would be just a bit longer than that. This was at 21:20 GMT. We continued to be told the old “Just a few minutes more” until we eventually landed at 22:00. Even though we were 10 minutes earlier than we were supposed to arrive, we still waited 30 minutes past our "scheduled" landing time.
Now, surely, the air-traffic control people told him that we'd be spending a while in the stack when we arrived, if not just before when the Co-pilot told us that we'd be landing in 40 minutes. Thinking about this, I, and everyone around me could not recall a time when our plane had landed anywhere near on-time, except at the “graveyard hours” of around 02:00 GMT. I then started wondering if Heathrow/BA/BAA knows that they don't have enough runways (and that's not their fault, for environmental reasons that I won't comment on, various groups are trying to prevent a new runway being built) but are keeping us in the dark about how long we'll spend circling stacks, to avoid environmental and passenger outrage, in the hope that people will just all think they're unlucky and that everyone else doesn't get any of the waits.
I can see how this problem has been brought about, as times are uncertain at other airports, so they can't give people a certain slot. But letting it all pile up in stacks and then getting rid of the backlog at the end of the day, while deceiving travellers, does not seem to me to be the right way to go about solving a problem, especially as it contributes to a new problem, climactic change.
I do not know if this problem is British Airways specific or even Heathrow specific, but I can see that something doesn't seem quite right.
