Flight delay due to untrained pilot

MickCrook

I had booked  holiday for my family (7 in all) flying from East Midlands Airport to Chambery. After a long delay TUI postponed the flight until the following day. They put us up in a hotel, which all went well and the flight the following day was fine.

Following further communication with them when I returned, they said that "The disruption was cause by weather and with Chambery being such a small difficult airport the Pilots need special training in landing in adverse weather conditions and not all pilots undertake this training."

To my mind this meant that TUI had not scheduled a suitable pilot for the flight and so the delay was their fault, rather than being because of the weather alone. I have asked them this and am awaiting a reply.

I woud welcome any views on this or suggestions on how to progress this.

eskbanker

It does seem an unusual admission, so if they're effectively conceding that a better pilot would have been able to land in the conditions then I think you have a decent argument that despite the extraordinary circumstances, they didn't take all reasonable measures to mitigate them, therefore compensation is due.

As you say, see what they come back with, but if their final response is still to reject your claim, you can take them to AviationADR.

Was this a flight-only booking with the TUI airline and/or a package with the TUI tour operator?  The airline has clear liabilities under the flight delay/cancellation regulations, but if a package then the organiser should (separately) compensate you for missing the start of the holiday, under the Package Travel Regulations....

MattMattMattUK

MickCrook said:

I had booked  holiday for my family (7 in all) flying from East Midlands Airport to Chambery. After a long delay TUI postponed the flight until the following day. They put us up in a hotel, which all went well and the flight the following day was fine.

Following further communication with them when I returned, they said that "The disruption was cause by weather and with Chambery being such a small difficult airport the Pilots need special training in landing in adverse weather conditions and not all pilots undertake this training."

To my mind this meant that TUI had not scheduled a suitable pilot for the flight and so the delay was their fault, rather than being because of the weather alone. I have asked them this and am awaiting a reply.

I woud welcome any views on this or suggestions on how to progress this.

I think it is very much an "it depends" scenario, if the conditions were unusual for the time of year then it would be purely down to the weather, if they were typical then it depends.

Detail on the airport flight operations. 
https://www.key.aero/article/challenging-airports-chambery-france-lflb

tacpot12

Rostering a pilot without the necessary qualifications for the route to be flown would seem to be entirely under the airline's control. However, it sounds like the correctly trained pilots were rostered to fly the route, but due to the weather, those pilots could no longer fly the route and there were not enough other pilots available to do so the following day, possibly because the original pilots had run out of duty hours. There are limits on the time pilots can work given the safety-critical nature of their job, and just turning up to the airport to pre-flight the aircraft and oversee loading the aircraft with fuel, luggage and passengers consumes some duty time, so they may not have had enough left to allow them to fly the route and return. 

It sounds like the root cause of the delay was the weather.