Gibraltar Diversion

This diary entry is from my time as a first officer. We’re heading down to Gibraltar today, an airport on the southernmost tip of Spain (although technically on UK soil) that’s infamous for it’s tricky approach due to ‘The Rock’ protruding over 400m into the air directly next to the runway. It’s a notoriously windy destination anyway, but when the wind is from the south it can become extremely dangerous as it curls around the rock and the airport is engulfed in unpredictable and unstable winds.

It’s such a challenging airport in fact that our Captains have to go through special training to be able to land here, and only a select few are able to operate these flights. The conditions today aren’t looking great. In fact, they’re pretty damn abysmal. The wind is gusting strongly from the South so we load up with fuel, anticipating that it may take more than one approach attempt to land successfully. For once, I’m excited to be at work!

With around an hour to go until we arrive, we get a message to notify us that the wind has ripped a radio cable meaning ATC down there were now offline. No timeframe was given as to how long they’d be offline for and it wasn’t clear whether this actually meant the airport was still open or not. The captain did what I think any good captain should do, and turned to me to ask what my plan of action would be. I verbalised my line of thinking that the options as I saw them were we could either divert to our destination airfield now. Doing this would give the ground crew and our operations department a big head start in getting things prepared for that diversion, and get our return passengers on buses from Gibraltar to Malaga which was our diversion airfield. This bussing route was commonplace due to the high number of Gibraltar flights that end up diverting there due to wind, but it did take a full 4 hours for the bus journey to be made.

The other option was to continue towards Gibraltar and see what the situation is when we arrive. We could enter the airborne hold there and assess what’s going on. We don’t know how long it’s going to take ATC to sort this radio issue, or if they can sort it at all, but we had plenty of fuel so could spend at least 20 minutes in the hold. I express my desire to give the passengers the best chance possible of getting to Gibraltar without a 4 hours bus journey, and believe the best option is to continue and take up the hold just off the coast of Gibraltar. I suggest we remain there for 15 minutes to give ATC as much time as possible to fix the issue and still allows us time for 2 approaches if we couldn’t get in off the first.

If we diverted any earlier than this, to then find out that ATC managed to fix the issue, I think our passengers would understandably have lots of questions when we landed in Malaga and they could see other aircraft on the flight tracker app making approaches into Gibraltar.

The captain agreed with my line of thinking (although I’m pretty sure this was the game plan he had in mind before he even asked me the question) and we continued on, electing to not let the passengers know about any of this just yet as it could all be cleared up by the time we arrive.

We spent the next 40 minutes asking each ATC unit we spoke with whether they had an update on the ATC issue in Gib, but it seemed everyone was in the dark. Just as we entered the airborne hold, we got our answer. “Airport closed for next 2+ hours” printed out on our little printer in the cockpit (yes this is actually a thing) – a message sent digitally from Gibraltar ATC.

Decision made. Our training kicks in and myself and the captain both know we have certain items we need to ‘tick off’ as we request our diversion to Malaga. On the short hop over there, the captain hands me control of the aircraft whilst he handles the management side of things and we both go into our own zones. He sends a message to our operations department to get the ball rolling on the passenger buses in order to minimise our wait on the ground in Malaga. He then speaks to the cabin crew and passengers informing them of what’s happening. Whilst he’s doing that, I re-programme our computer systems and set them up for an approach into Malaga, cross checking the information in the aircraft database with what we have on our charts.

After this we come back together, he reviews what I’ve programmed into the aircraft, briefs me on how he’s going to fly it, and then takes over control of the aircraft, just in the nick of time as we’re already turning onto the runway’s final approach.

Once on the ground and we’ve unloaded 200 suitably frustrated passengers, it ends up being the full 4 hour wait until our next passengers arrive. We kill time by eating, Netflix, reading, and more eating whilst sat on the aircraft waiting for our new passengers. You’re pretty limited on what you can do whilst stuck on stationary aircraft waiting for passengers.

By the time the outbound passengers are all finally on, it’s looking like we’ll actually be slightly beyond our maximum flight duty period by the time we land in Gatwick Airport, so we all need to confirm we’re happy to go into ‘discretion’ in order to get these passengers back home that night. This is essentially extending our legal hours by up to 2 hours. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly; if you as pilots and crew decide to do it, and something goes wrong….the blame for incidents could immediately be placed on your decision to extend these hours. If any member of the crew isn’t willing to operate past these hours, the likelihood is that we’d all be placed in hotels for the night and fly back the next day. Flying back in yesterday’s underwear and a smelly shirt is never the nicest feeling. Thankfully on this occasion all the crew are in the same boat in wanting to get home and happy to extend the legal hours to do so.

It’s a standard landing for me back into Gatwick, it was dark when we left this morning and it’s dark again now. We part ways at the car park entrance, knowing it’s very unlikely we’ll fly with each other again that year, such is the nature of a large operation like easyJet at Gatwick airport.  

I get back home around 7pm. It’s been an exhausting but rewarding day with plenty of variety and challenges. Obviously, every day couldn’t be like this as it wouldn’t be sustainable as airline pilots, but it’s definitely enjoyable getting a day like today where we really use our brains.

I’ll be up early again tomorrow, a similar wake up time for a similar length flight so it’s lights out by 20:30.