Thoughts please

PunkRoquefort

I recently flew an internal UK flight, lasting 1 hr 20 mins and the flight was delayed by over 6 hours.

The weather was pretty overcast and it was raining heavily that day, plus I understand parts of the UK had a thunderstorm.

On boarding the plane, the pilot apologised for the delay, saying there was a technical issue and the plane needed to be repaired in a different location in the airport.

I arrived at the airport about 2.5 hrs before my flight, to see other flights by the same airline had already been delayed, bound for other locations. Other airlines' flights were not affected.

I claimed and got 100% refund on the food and drink I had, during the delay, but the airline refused my claim for the flight delay, saying the plane got struck by lightning.

How can I check this is the real reason, given that flights earlier were cancelled, yet I got refunded for my meal?

silvercar

Duty of care would cover meals, compensation is a different matter. I suspect the airline is blaming the weather at least partly.

PunkRoquefort

Thank you for explaining. Am I best just leaving things as they are?

eskbanker

PunkRoquefort said:

I claimed and got 100% refund on the food and drink I had, during the delay, but the airline refused my claim for the flight delay, saying the plane got struck by lightning.

How can I check this is the real reason, given that flights earlier were cancelled, yet I got refunded for my meal?

As above, reimbursement of expenses is unrelated to a compensation claim - if the latter is rejected because the airline claims extraordinary circumstances (such as lightning strike, which would ultimately present as a technical issue) then there isn't any public domain data via which you can validate that, but if the unnamed airline is a member of an ADR scheme, such as AviationADR, then you can submit a claim for arbitration there and they'll examine the matter in much more detail.