New York; Tuesday, 20 December, 2022

Eventually just before midnight there started to be some movement with flights being called for boarding in order at slow intervals. At 01:15 we were assured that we should start boarding in about 30 minutes time, 30 minutes later and the axe fell on our flight as we were informed it had been cancelled – no reason given, but the general thought was that the crew didn’t have enough hours left to make the journey. So at 2am we were all escorted down to the checkin desks to get rebooked onto flights later in the day, pick up our luggage and either take the BA option of a hotel a long way out of town, or make our own arrangements.

Rather than waiting for the shuttle to the remote airport I decided that BA could pick up the tab for an Uber to a closer airport hotel and made my own self-booking arrangements, so that by 3am I was finally tucked up in bed.

I only got about 4 hours sleep before the ongoing jetlag kicked in and at 7am I was wide awake, which was probably a good thing as it meant I could have breakfast and then log onto the work laptop just after 8am Eastern, 1pm back the UK and work the half day that I was supposed to be working .

Having done my hours I had a couple of hours to spare, but given I was in an airport hotel completely surrounded by interstates I just sat in the room browsing the web for a little while before I checked out at 2pm and picked up the hotel shuttle back to the airport to attempt the journey all over again.

I had an equally smooth journey through the airport and into the lounge where I spent a few hours hoping that it would be an equally smooth journey onwards.

Of course, with all the previous issues it was inevitable that it wouldn’t go completely smoothly, and 45 minutes after we’d boarded we were still sat at the gate waiting for a couple of bags from missing passengers to be off-loaded. In the end we pushed back a little over an hour late, with a further 5-minute delay pushing back because the flight after ours beat us to pushing back and we had to wait for it to leave the gate area before we could start our pushback.

The usual lengthy, nearly 30-minute, taxi at JFK, but then, nearly 24 hours late, we were airborne and on our way back to London.