Up, Down and Around and Around at Heathrow

So, it holiday time again. Our first 2 week break for a wee while. A few weeks ago Dave turned 50, so we have a few lovely trips planned this year to celebrate. The first is a 7 night trip back to New York. One of our favourite cities.

We don’t fly out until tomorrow morning, however decided to fly down to Heathrow today to avoid all the stress of flying down on the red-eye, and potential worry of delays and missing connections. We have a night at the T5 Sofitel, a lovely hotel attached to the terminal which means you can just walk to and from the hotel without having to use the shuttle buses.

However our flight down to Heathrow wasn’t without incident ! In all my 45 years of flying, I’ve never experienced an aborted landing until this afternoon ! To be honest it wasn’t as scary as I had expected, but then again it was maybe more controlled than many. We could see the ground approaching, and was above the runway, however at the last minute we felt and heard the power of the engines rev up, and up we went again ! The hosties were quick to come onto the intercom to assure us that everything was ok, and the pilots would speak to us once they have finished the manoeuvre and speaking with air traffic control. It turned out that the plane that had landed just in front of us hadn’t cleared the runway quick enough, so our pilot had taken the decision to abort.

Then just as I was typing this post the hotel fire alarm went off ! We jumped up and put our shoes on and grabbed the essentials, and just as we went to leave the room the alarm went off. I do hope its not going to be one of those nights !!

Roll on tomorrow and the luxury experience of BA First Class ( thanks to our Avios points and AMEX  )

Landing T5 Heathrow SOFITEL London Heathrow