Tier Point Run to Hawaii in Nov 2022 – Day 6 – Budapest (BUD) to London (LHR)

By Nige on Tue 15 Nov 2022 at 18:26
Type: Post
Story: Tier Point Run to Hawaii in Nov 2022
Tags: British Airways | BUD | Budapest | Heathrow | LHR | London | Trips

The transfer arrangements seemed a little odd at BUD. I went direct to the scanners that you can see on the right hand side. I had to stir the team of three into action. They were surprised that I wanted to connect from a London flight onto another London flight. But I got them all fired up in the end. When I had picked up my stuff after it had been through the scanner, the main guy said to me: “you English are so English” and we all laughed at that.

Other passengers carried on a bit further to a Transfer Desk which must be a check prior to passengers being sent on to the scanning team that I used. I may have circumvented the official process.

Back at Gate B6, i watched all the rest of the passengers off board the aircraft through the glass walls. At the gate, I was joined by one guy who was in 01A on the outbound and he was due to be in the same seat on the way back. He noticed 3 others that he recognised from the outbound flight. That makes 5. I suspect there may actually have been more.

The return flight was showing a 25 min delay in departing, but at least we eventually got onboard and we could relax in our seats for the final leg in our respective trips.

Flight: BA0867 Equip: A320
Sched Depart: 18:50 Actual: 19:27
Sched Arrival: 20:40 Actual: 21:00
Takeoff: 19:40 Landing: 20:54

Boarding was crazy and again took way too long. Whilst boarding was going on, I popped to use the facilities and was caught in the boarding queue on my way back to my seat. I was stood for 5 mins and the queue didn’t move at all in that time. It gave me time to talk to the cabin crew about the challenges of boarding and ideas about how we can speed things up. Primary issue from a crew perspective is the number of large cases that need to fit into overhead bins.

The captain thought that even though we were pushing back almost 40 mins late, with our flight plan and the weather there was a good chance we might arrived back at Heathrow on time. Is he kidding? Let’s see how close he was in that prediction – read on!

I chose not to take up the offer of food and drink on the way back, even though there was another nice sounding curry on the menu.

Got some good views of the City of London on the way into Heathrow. It was a very clear evening, so very few clouds getting in the way for a change.

Stunned to find out that Heathrow had prepared the Stand Guidance System ahead of our arrival and was ready for us! That’s the first time in 6 flights in the past week or so that the flight I was on didn’t need to wait for at least 10 mins for the Stand Guidance System to be turned on. Well done Heathrow – there’s still hope for you!

So how did the captain do (compared to his prediction in Budapest)? We arrived about 20 mins late, so that he managed to catch up about 20 mins on the schedule. Still late though!

Follow the whole story here: Tier Point Run to Hawaii in Nov 2022