Luleå; Tuesday, 31 May, 2022

We arrived at Heathrow with plenty of time to spare for the flight, little to know that waiting time was something we wouldn’t be short of. Though, the assistance for my mum to take her down to the gate was so late that by the time we made it onboard we were the last passengers in.

And that’s where we sat for the next 90 minutes or so, whilst the pilots dealt with a technical issue that was preventing the plane for leaving. It turned out that it was the air conditioning unit not functioning correctly, which we could probably all have told them given how warm the plane was.

Eventually they decided that they needed to run some more checks that required everyone to get off of the plane – obviously so we couldn’t see that the BA Techs were just going to hit whatever wasn’t working with a hammer until it did work – so we were all deboarded back into the terminal, at now 8:40pm

As it was so late, and the delay was likely to stretch on further BA would normally be liable for giving us vouchers to get some refreshments, but with the last flights from the B gates already on final boarding all the cafes had shut up shop, so thankfully some bright spark authorised the whole plane being given access to the business lounge, which at least meant we could all get some food and drink, and kept the whole plane in one location.

Eventually with the clock rapidly approaching 11pm they announced that we could reboard the plane as the fault had been fixed. Which was cutting it a bit fine as there was only a short window now before the night flights curfew kicked in which would leave us stuck at Heathrow.

The pilot and co-pilot for the flight had been swapped over as the original pair had exceeded their hours, so a relief crew, who had assumed they’d be spending their night at home rather than flying up to Sweden, were in charge – though the same cabin crew were still on the flight.

We eventually pushed back exactly 4 hours late and made our way to the runway and out of Heathrow just minutes before the curfew kicked in.

Given the flight had left so late I was quite surprised how quickly we were met by ground crew at Arlanda, with a wheelchair for mum already waiting and after a surprisingly quick run through immigration – I suppose it was only our flight at that time needing to go through, we finally had our bags and headed towards the hotel a couple of minutes before 3am.

Thankfully, we were staying at a hotel attached to the terminal building, so we were in our rooms a couple of minutes later – or as it’s know in Stockholm at the beginning of June, Dawn.