After my weekend in Turkey I had
a day in Hamburg on the following Friday. It’s a regular trip and I know the
journey well, It involves leaving one London Airport and returning in the
evening to another one, neither of which is my “local” airport. The weather
conditions on this day were forecast to be blustery. The return flight left
Hamburg on time and all seemed to be proceeding as normal but as we descended
below the cloud on the final approach I thought the ground looked familiar, as
we touched down I thought I recognise this airport and we had in fact just
landed at my local airport some 10 minutes from my house, I assumed that the
weather had been too bad to land at the airport we were scheduled to arrive at
and that we would turn right off the runway and make our way to the terminal.
We then turned left and headed to the anti-terrorist hijack stand, at this
point I could see things going pear shaped for me especially as I was leaving
for LA and Fiji the next morning. Once we arrived the engines were shut down
and the captain made a PA to the passengers saying we have been instructed to
land here by the UK boarder control agency and that we should not use our
mobile phones. After a small while some steps were brought up to the aircraft
and the police boarded and after speaking to the crew made their way towards
the back of the aircraft and stopped by a row of seats occupied by a youth
football team. After a few moments it became apparent there had been a HUGE
error made by the UK Boarder agency.
The UK have a voluntary scheme
where all names are transmitted by the airlines to a database prior to the
departure, these names are then checked for outstanding arrest warrants and
against anti-terrorist watch lists this is all done before departure and if
there is a suspected terrorist on board then they are supposed to be removed
from the aircraft prior to departure. On our flight for whatever reason the
names were not checked until after the aircraft had departed which prompted a
request from the UK government to divert the flight, to ensure the safety of
the UK they scrambled 2 Typhoon fighter aircraft to escort us into the airport
at huge costs. So who was this suspected terrorist it turns out he plays for a
Danish U12’s football team and was coming to the UK for a long weekend of
football matches against other youth football teams. It took about an hour to
resolve this and then they said it was all fine and that they would fly us back
to the airport where we were supposed to be going. Several of us said thanks
but no thanks and we would like to get off here, sorry that’s not possible they
said, that’s too complicated and not allowed. We argued for some time but to no
avail and it became apparent that we were not going to be allowed off, not
willing to risk being arrested we complied and were flown back to our original
scheduled airport where we caught a bus back to my local airport arriving some
five hours after first arriving at the airport earlier in the day.
