00:00Here in Sydney, Australia, there are thousands of British people who are very simply stranded.
00:07They were planning to fly back on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or indeed today, Tuesday,
00:13and they simply haven't been able to. I'm just looking across the apron. There's an Etihad and
00:20an Emirates aircraft there. Qatar Airways has also cancelled flights, of course, because of
00:26the shutdown of Gulf airspace. Now, the flights have resumed. Etihad had a couple of flights last
00:35night, and Emirates is planning to begin today, which is good news, assuming that there are no
00:42further shutdowns, given that President Trump has warned of yet more attacks on Iran. But if things
00:49do start getting back to normal, well, that's a good sign. But I fear it's going to get actually
00:56slightly worse before it gets better. That's because these airlines have pilots, planes, passengers,
01:04cabin crew stranded all over the place. And in order to get things back to a coherent schedule,
01:12it will take time. For instance, they don't want to send 500 people from here in Sydney to Dubai,
01:20only to find that there's no way of getting them onwards to London or Manchester. So if you are
01:27caught in all of this, it is going to be some days. I've been speaking to one passenger,
01:34Gillian Oliver from Leicestershire, who's a farmer who desperately needs to get back.
01:39She and her husband Alf have just spent £9,000 on new flights going via San Francisco,
01:47an extra couple of thousand miles. And that's in economy, not in the business class they were
01:54hoping for.
01:55Relieved that we've actually got flights, but really, really angry. And I feel so sorry for
02:00all the thousands of Europeans that are probably panicking, that are over in Australia and New
02:06Zealand and in this area, that just are looking for flights home and can't find them, or they're
02:13just too expensive. Particularly young backpackers, you know, it's awful for them if they're on their
02:19own particularly and they haven't got the funds to be able to get flights back. I feel really sorry
02:24for them.
02:25And how do you think this whole thing has been handled by the airlines, I guess, by the government?
02:30Not very well, I don't think at all. At all. We've had very little, you know, from the airlines.
02:37So I imagine that everybody else is in the same boat, really.
02:42Elsewhere, of course, there's still great concern about the 300,000 British people who are in the
02:49Gulf States, where the Foreign Office still has a do not travel warning in place. But at least if
02:56flights are resuming, I imagine that UK routes, particularly London Heathrow, will be prioritised
03:03because those simply have the largest number of people. But at the moment, people are still
03:10counting the cost. And talking to the kinds of passengers here, they are hundreds of pounds
03:17out of pocket. The airlines haven't been picking up the bill. They are having to do so. And I fear
03:23that they may find that they've fallen into this gap between where air passenger rights rules end
03:29and travel insurance begins. So I'm afraid another day of disruption. I very much hope that things
03:38can, at least by tomorrow, start going in the right direction and people getting back where they need
03:45to be.
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