Two hours; one hour; fifteen minutes. Depending on the source, these were the lengths of delays to get through passport control at Palma Son Sant Joan Airport from around half past midnight on Friday morning.
Palma Airport passport control "collapse" put down to unscheduled flights
Take your pick as to how long the delay was
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- Over two hours for Britons to get through Palma airport queues
- Palma Airport passport control "collapse" put down to unscheduled flights
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All airports have peak times, sometimes without much warning. Again, try Stansted. I've waited at least an hour in passport queues on many occasions. But the vast majority of flights arrive here from Schengen member states, so that may explain why it's only pointed out in the MDB. There is no passport control for them.
What’s an unscheduled flight? Surely all flights are scheduled. You don’t get a 300 seat passenger jet rocking up out of nowhere.
MartinPSComputer systems have unscheduled down times. Ask BA,UK Air Traffic Control or Son Espaces. The new computer system will hopefully be great most of the time, but I do wonder what contingency will be put in place for when it falls over.
Nigel MaudeI don't see how we can predict how the new computer-based system will work, based on delays in the old system caused by not enough humans. The new computer system might work brilliantly. Or it might be full of bugs. But part of the point of it is that it will be there 24/7.
The 'Summer UK Terminal' (Terminal A) at Palma airport opened for seasonal business on the last day of March. Since then, I've arrived from the UK into that terminal four times, and the queues have been nothing short of scandalous on all four occasions (way longer than anything I experienced during my weekly arrivals into PMI Terminal A in 2023). Arriving passengers look horrified. Thank Heavens I have a European passport and can bypass the queues. It's the worst possible "Welcome To Mallorca" sign. Brexit cannot be blamed, as it wasn't this bad in 2023. Utterly embarrassing really.
If nobody really can say what it was, then it most likely was only a brief queue (people arriving would be especially impatient at that time of the morning) or it may have never happened. Or perhaps communists did it. That's the most logical explanation. On a side note; has anyone landed at Stansted lately? Or Atlanta Hartzfield? This would be the fast lane by comparison.
"Great heavens", a polite expletive for what we have to expect in October when bureaucracy in the name of computers takes over in October. If the airport, police and passengers can not agree a delay time, just imagine the chaos we have to look forward to in October. I just hope Fujitsu has had nothing to do with the EU software that has taken so long to "effect", and I also hope the EU has taken note of the wake up call the UK government has had over the Post Office software scandal. The word is already going around in UK that Spain and Portugal are potential "aggro" spots for holidays, so does not spell good for the overall Peninsular economy.