Breaking news is best on Twitter
As mentioned in my earlier post, on Friday evening I was at London City Airport en route to Amsterdam. I love London City Airport: it’s small, quick to get through, £20 in a cab from my office or flat (compared to £15 for Heathrow Express or similar fares to Gatwick or Luton) and the staff treat you as human beings rather than cattle.
Also, as I’m not the biggest fan of flying, what I like about City is that I can get there early evening on a Friday, have a few beers and something to eat and before I know it I’m on the plane enjoying one more beer and then I have landed at my destination. The place is full of city boys doing the same thing, so there is a sense of camaraderie. (Or, alternatively, I am just a bit odd).
Anyhow, on Friday there I was waiting for my flight to Amsterdam, which was showing as being delayed by almost 2 hours. Annoying, especially as the VLM flight due to take off at the same time made it away quickly. But then, all of a sudden the status changed to “Cancelled”.
As we now know, the crash landing of the incoming flight from Amsterdam was unfolding.
Not that you’d know from inside the airport! As other flights started to show “cancelled” or simply disappeared from the departure screen people started to gather round the information desk. All the staff would say is that there had been an “incident on the runway” and that we couldn’t leave.
People speculated perhaps someone had run on the runway? Out of the windows people could see fire engines, but no fire.
Bar staff said they knew what had happened and it was serious but they couldn’t tell us.
An announcement said the airport was now closed but we had to stay where we were and couldn’t leave. A further announcement asked passengers to return their duty free!
London City has free Wi-Fi. I fired up my laptop and nothing on BBC News or Sky News: but then Twitter came to the rescue….
First entry I could find was cryptic:
“hope everyone is ok at london city”
@exatco
then they came thick and fast:
“Something odd at London City airport. All flights canceled no one allowed to leave. Talk of a crash. Website says due to “an incident”…!!!”
@burgesg
“LCY London City Airport Incident. What happened? Runway closed?!”
@interchris
Finally some clarity:
“Serious Incident at London City Airport: BA 8456 from Amsterdam landed and LCY and the front gear collapsed. Pax evacuated via slides”
@TransWorld
My own tweets were soon re-tweeting their way around Twitter too. I even got a few direct messages from people I didn’t know. One claimed to be a journalist. All very exciting.
Fellow passengers were tweeting too:
“All flights from LCY are now cancelled, but noone is allowed to leave the airport. Noone seems to know what’s going on.”
@philip_clarkson
Then the story appeared on BBC News and Sky News and soon a small crowd of people were queuing to use my laptop to look at other flight options, contact hotels or read the news reports for themselves.
In true British spirit passengers who 30 minutes earlier were looking at each other with thinly veiled looks of contempt were all chatting together, giving each other advice on how to handle travel plans and collectively wondering what had happened.
Throughout all of this there were NO official announcements form the airport as to what had actually taken place!
Free tea and coffee were obviously part of their rehearsed emergency plan as they started to serve them en mass! I opted for more alcohol but had to pay!
Then, all of a sudden, security started throwing everyone out of departures very rudely and very quickly. I had no checked in luggage so didn’t have to queue, but many people did! On the way out the police asked each passenger if they’d seen anything on the runway before they could go.
Fortunately no one was killed or seriously injured, but it did give a strange insight into how these situations are handled. I wonder if the refusal to give any information to passengers is a paranoia that giving the wrong information can result in a law suit?
All the BA staff had gone home and BA’s phone lines were closed so people had to guess at what was the best course of action. We headed off to Heathrow – others tried to book themselves into local hotels.
One thing is for sure though: as the Hudson River plane crash also proved breaking news now belongs on twitter. Forget news wires: twitter is the wire of the people!