Funchal; Tuesday, 28 May, 2019

From all my previous trips to Funchal I had pretty much exhausted all there was to do in the city. It meant that I could have a bit of a lie in and a late breakfast before heading out into town. As my ticket was still valid, I went for a ride on the open-top bus, and then stopped back in town 90 minutes later to grab a light lunch.

I then wandered over to the cable car and took it up into the mountains, with the intention of having a wander around Monte at the top of the cable car, but by the time I got up there the clouds had closed in and it was quite damp at the top, so instead I headed into the small café built into the basement of the top cable car station and from where there are good views down the route of the cable car and into central Funchal.

After a small beer and watching the cable cars coming and going it was time to make my way back down to town level and then wandered back to the hotel to pick up my bags.

I walked over to the pickup point for my shuttle back to the airport, which arrived a couple of minutes early and then whisked us off to the airport to check in.

At check-in the agent was happily telling everyone that the flight was currently early and so could we all make sure we get to the gate about an hour before the scheduled departure time as they would like to get us away early.

Everything was running fine until about 20 minutes before the now very early plane was scheduled to land when I noticed that there hadn’t been any landings for a little while. A quick check online revealed that once again the wind had picked up and at present the airport was closed to incoming flights.

I sat in the airport watching the flight track of my inbound plane on a radar website as it entered a very familiar stack from the previous day. Eventually, after about 15 minutes the BA flight came out of the stack and went for an attempted landing, which it promptly aborted and headed away from the airport in the direction of Porto Santo. At this point I did think that the pilots had decided to divert, which potentially could have meant the flight being cancelled until the next day (the same thing had happened a few days earlier).

Thankfully the flight radar showed that it was merely heading back up to the stacking position for a little while.

About 10 minutes later a TAP plane came into view near the airport did a couple of loops to the south of the island, and then came in for a successful landing. The BA flight, now 20 minutes late, followed closed behind, at which point it became clear that I would be getting home today.

Almost as soon as the flight had landed they started making boarding calls for us to head to the gates, and less than 20 minutes after the flight had landed we were already on buses heading over to the plane to board. Somehow, despite the delays the crew had managed to turn the plane around in record time and we finally pushed back and headed for the runway bang on time.