Flying off to sunny England

December 19, 2006 by paul
Filed under: Uncategorized

We flew out of Toronto with Zoom Airlines, having booked upgrades to their “premium” seats which meant an extra few inches of legroom and nicer seats. The flight over to Britain was pretty uneventful, although one screaming kid did their best to ensure no-one got any sleep. We arrived at Glasgow a little ahead of schedule thanks to a healthy tailwind, and we were told we’d be off as soon as the Scots disembarked … but a few minutes later we got an update: there’s freezing fog at Manchester (our destination) which meant we wouldn’t be allowed to take off for about 2 hours! The captain said he’d inform the control tower that we were ready to go as soon as they had a slot, but unfortunately we waited and waited and then finally got the OK 2 hours later as we’d initially been told. At least we got to see another film while we waited – I don’t remember the first film (it was something soppy that Kerri watched but I didn’t – I’m told it was Flicka), followed by Elf and then Click while we were on the tarmac at Glasgow.

The flight down to Manchester only took about half an hour but then we joined the queue waiting to land – we could see the planes below us in the stack, and the on-screen map showed us circling close to the airport. I think we waited for another half an hour before we finally got the OK to land. As we descended into the cloud I could see (or rather couldn’t!) why there was such a delay – it felt like we’d been in the clouds for ages and when it finally started to thin out a little I realised we were only a few feet from the ground! Literally it was just seconds from the cloud beginning to reduce until we landed, and even then the fog was so bad we couldn’t see very far.

Clearing customs was very quick – Kerri headed for the “Others” channel whilst I went with the other Brits. A couple standing next to me asked where UK passport holders went and I pointed at the EU sign; the woman said it was a shame that it didn’t say British any more, and I added “or even English” and then the guy said the two queues should be Yorkshire and Other.