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I smirked at the melodrama over reports of airport chaos. Then my own flight was cancelled

Last weekend’s mass flight cancellations were a reminder that the airport is little more than a stage where the contest between the ‘system’ and real life plays out

Stranded passengers in LAX following last week's CrowdStrike outage. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Stranded passengers in LAX following last week's CrowdStrike outage. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Rachel Connolly
Sat Jul 27 2024 - 07:05

Last weekend, I was supposed to attend the wedding of a very dear old friend in Belfast. I had been looking forward to it for months. I planned to fly from London to Belfast on Saturday at around 6pm. The wedding started at lunchtime the next day. This, I reckoned, would give me more than enough time for important pre-wedding rituals such as donning my fake tan and scouring my mum’s wardrobe for almost certainly better accessories than the ones I had brought home. I’d even booked transport months in advance. How civilised, I thought, to be planning far enough in advance to be able to afford the evening flight. No 5am starts for me, not this time.

Then, on the Friday morning I received a voice note from another dear old friend saying that some kind of global IT failure was causing chaos at the airport and they worried all our flights would be cancelled. They were scheduled to fly on Friday. I had no idea what they were talking about, and even smirked at the melodrama of it. Then, of course, I googled and discovered that an issue with a system update by CrowdStrike, one of those cybersecurity companies that lurks unseen underneath the digital infrastructure we all interact with constantly, had knocked out payment systems and software at airports and hospitals all over the world. Hundreds of flights were indeed being cancelled.

I felt sorry for my friend, but assumed they would have it sorted by Saturday. Now, in hindsight, I wonder who I took “they” to be in this instance. The “system”? The “adults”?

This seems to speak to some presumption I hold that if I need something to work smoothly for me, then a team somewhere will work tirelessly and invisibly to make this happen. By lunchtime my friend’s flight had been cancelled. You’ll easily get another one, I informed them. No, they kept saying. The knock on effect had made flights going to Belfast so scarce there simply weren’t any seats available. Well, I thought, what a shame for them. But it couldn’t last longer than a day.

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At the airport on Saturday we were all ushered into one of those holding-pen-style departure areas where we sat for a few hours. I had been forced to abandon my drink under the pretext that the plane was taking off imminently. The flight was delayed and delayed. Then, with no ceremony at all, cancelled.

I opened my laptop looking for a solution. I had to get to this wedding, there would certainly be some way around it. I quickly discovered that there were no flights between London and Belfast until after about 4pm the next day, and that those cost upwards of £600. I tried other cities and found exactly the same. I tried the rail and sail: no availability. I phoned my mum and she found a cheap flight taking off from Manchester the next morning and offered to book it. I checked if I would be able to get from London to Manchester before it took off. No trains. I couldn’t really believe it. I kept searching until I was scouring for flight paths that don’t even exist.

Everyone in the holding pen started to bicker and grumble, casting around for someone to blame. We were supposed to leave, but we all seemed to feel that if we sat there for long enough the flight might be sort of un-cancelled. If we grumbled and complained enough, perhaps.

Even before the cancellation there had been the usual arguments you will see at the airport. The airport is, after all, always a deeply fraught environment because of the great and terrible energy that circulates there constantly. There is the nervousness and excitement that foregrounds any holiday; the potential for enormous disappointment if anything goes wrong and the holiday is ruined; the vague indignity of traipsing through security with your shampoo and conditioner decanted into tiny bottles, holding your belt and your shoes in your hands; and the constant sense you will be told off or fined for breaking one of the myriad rules that we all know in our hearts are stupid and pointless.

A few years ago, I remember I was behind a group of young men jetting off on a lads’ holiday in the security queue. They were all forced to surrender their bumper bottles of Paco Rabanne cologne. They tried to plead their case, imploring the security supervisor to think of the money wasted. Various members of their party kept listing different amounts the bottles had cost. Ninety quid, 130 quid, 160 quid. The supervisor wouldn’t budge. “You know it’s not right,” one of the young men finally said, steely faced, looking the supervisor straight in the eye, as the bottles were whisked away.

And this is just the base level of agitation that exists among people going on the type of holiday being conducted for the sake of relaxation and enjoyment by a group of people who basically like each other. I would venture that this is only a tiny percentage of the traffic that passes through the airport. The rest is all families at each other’s throats, couples trying to resurrect flailing relationships, forced participation hen weekends that are far too expensive for anyone to enjoy, and the like. There may even be a man, or even several of these men, skulking around anxiously with an engagement ring concealed in his hand luggage.

I have seen so, so many fights at the airport over the years. And I had always assumed these were all ostensibly about money. What else do people really fight over? But after this weekend I think the truth is more that the airport is effectively a stage upon which we nervously anticipate that a great clash between the “system” and reality may play out. The system demands, with no flexibility, that our Paco Rabanne must be smaller than 100ml and that our bags must fit in the stupid little cage. (A rule that is enforced chaotically enough to invite you to chance it, but then sometimes even when the plane is half empty, it’s impossible to predict.) And the system promises a smooth, seamlessly convenient service that real life, with its IT failures and its human error, strains chaotically against.

Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast. Her first novel Lazy City was published last year.