Screen grab: British Airways’ cunning plan to rescue passengers from Costa Rica

Plane Talk: Passengers on BA2236, who spend Christmas in airport hotel rooms, certainly deserve sympathy. But so does the airline

Have you ever, when driving, had the unnerving and expensive experience of a foreign object shattering the windscreen? If so, you can begin to imagine the consternation of the pilots of British Airways flight 2237 from London Gatwick to San José in Costa Rica last Thursday, 23 December.

After a two-hour departure delay from Gatwick and an 11-hour flight from Sussex to the capital’s Juan Santamaría airport, I don’t know if the passengers were shattered. But the flight deck windscreen definitely was – apparently by a block of ice that fell from an aircraft 1,000 feet higher.

“Our highly trained pilots landed one of our aircraft as normal after it experienced a technical issue en route,” is all BA would say about the incident that caused the damage.

Some have speculated that space debris, a meteorite or even frozen human waste was responsible for the breakage. Whatever the cause, British Airways had a serious scheduling problem. The 777 was out of commission until the right parts and expertise could be assembled.

Central America is a wonderful region, but windscreens for wide-bodied jets and the specialist engineers to fit them are not exactly abundant. Which was unfortunate for the 200 or so passengers ticketed to fly back to Gatwick that evening on BA2236 – as well as the pilots and cabin crew who were scheduled to be back on the morning of Christmas Eve ahead of family celebrations.

As it turned out, they finally made landfall in Sussex on the afternoon of Boxing Day, having spent Christmas in airport hotel rooms waiting for news.

Following what turned out to be a 50-hour delay, a number of passengers have told me, at considerable length, about the shortcomings in communication during the incident`.

British Airways has, to its credit, accepted full responsibility. A spokesperson said: “It’s clear that we fell short on this occasion, and for that we apologise unreservedly.” Passengers are being refunded their air fares, on top of the £520 statutory compensation that BA must pay.

What with 100-plus hotel rooms in San José for two nights, and the cost of a new windscreen for a Boeing 777 running at several hundred times that for a Vauxhall Corsa, the damage to British Airways must be approaching £1m.

The airline, though, deserves credit for coming up with a creative solution to a crisis that happened at the worst possible time in terms of the emotional impact for passengers and crew.

Its cunning plan looked like this: two flights were scheduled to set off on Christmas Eve morning from Gatwick to Jamaica: one to the capital, Kingston, the other to the main resort airport, Montego Bay.

Engineers at Gatwick grabbed a spare windscreen and loaded it on the latter plane, and boarded themselves.

Both planes had been due to come back from Jamaica that night. But with the flights less than half full for the 24 December departures to Gatwick, British Airways calculated that the Kingston aircraft could be routed back via Montego Bay, just 84 miles away near the other end of the island, to pick up passengers for Gatwick.

The Montego Bay plane, meanwhile, would continue a couple of hours’ flying time southwest of Jamaica to San José. Passengers would board this jet, while the engineers repaired the stricken Boeing ready for flying home empty.

Something went wrong with the flight plan for the Jamaica-Costa Rica leg. The crew ran out of duty hours, which cost a further 24 hours’ delay. Pilots and engineers spent most of Christmas Day in a Jamaican hotel before flying on to San José and rescuing the passengers who, by this stage, were furious as well as upset. They deserve sympathy – as does the airline.

When things go wrong in aviation, they can go very wrong indeed.