Arguing against bad weather circumstance for a claim?

cubegame

Good afternoon.

I wondered what peoples opinions of this situation might be with regards to flight delay compensation. We were delayed for just over four hours on a flight from Copenhagen to Gatwick last night. I am sure that if I try to persue a claim against Norwegian they will cite bad weather (and I have seen they have a bad reputation of handling claims anyway).

The weather was bad in the vacinity of Copenhagen and also London and it did lead to a number of outbound flights from Copenhagen being delayed and cancelled. However, the extent of the delay seems disproportionate compared to other flights. The experience was not helped by the fact the airline had no ground representative and offered no support at all. The apparant reason for the delay was that on the incoming flight from Gatwick (which had been delayed by just over an hour) had had to divert to Oslo after unsuccessfully attempting an approach to Copenhagen. However, a number of flights landed during the same window in which this flight could have landed.

Having put details of the flight into a couple of no win no fee sites they advise that the a claim is unlikely to suceed. What I would like to know is if it is likely that it could be persued using the statistics for arrivals and departures to show that the weather circumstance would not be valid?

111KAB

cubegame - personally I would forget it. Norwegian tend not to pay out readily, a NWNF will not take on plus you have evidence that the weather caused delays. All in all facts and operator are against you so the 'battle odds' seemed stacked against you IMO.

cubegame

111KAB wrote: »

cubegame - personally I would forget it. Norwegian tend not to pay out readily, a NWNF will not take on plus you have evidence that the weather caused delays. All in all facts and operator are against you so the 'battle odds' seemed stacked against you IMO.

This was probably my thought to be honest. You can tell how they treat their passengers just by how they managed the delay on the ground.


I shall not be flying with them again though. Obviously their pilots are not experienced enough to fly in all conditions.

Voyager2002

cubegame wrote: »

This was probably my thought to be honest. You can tell how they treat their passengers just by how they managed the delay on the ground.


I shall not be flying with them again though. Obviously their pilots are not experienced enough to fly in all conditions.

Or they could use different 'planes from the ones that managed to cope with the weather... or even things like the amount of fuel on-board could make the difference between a safe take-off or needing to delay.

Again, different airlines have different attitudes to risk. The ex-air force pilots of Air France are skilful dare-devils, and I have had two experiences with them of dramatic landings in typhoons that no other airline would brave. However, the safety record of Air France is notably worse than that of comparable airlines, indicating that sometimes there are worse things than delays.