London - The plane to China touched down on time, at 9.25am on April Fool's Day. In Beijing.
Unfortunately, my boarding pass promised Shanghai. After a journey of 6 000 miles -including the last few hundred doubling back on itself -the jet was still 600 miles short of its destination. And if the diversion because of a fogbound airport was bad for the passengers, then pity the poor crew. At the time they should have been bidding us goodbye at the aircraft door, the pilots were having to negotiate for somewhere to park the 787, and someone to refuel it. The cabin crew had the unenviable task of pacifying customers who had paid top prices for a non-stop flight but were now going to arrive later than if they had bought a cheapie via the Gulf - though given the extra distance perhaps this was one occasion when the fuel surcharge I paid, £189 (about R3 900), was justified.
When we finally made it to Shanghai, I calculated that I had never spent so long inside a plane. During the 80 minutes on the ground at Beijing, the jet was parked at a remote stand and so we were not allowed off to stretch our legs, making it 16 hours onboard. More to the point, from a business perspective: most of the working day had disappeared. The flight's scheduled 9.25am arrival, combined with the 186mph Maglev train into town, should make a meeting at elevenses in the city centre manageable. Instead, it was 3.30pm before I reached The Bund, where commerce and tourism converge beside the Huangpu River.
I had plenty of time to recall other flights that had arrived in unexpected places. The main cause of diversions is poor weather at the destination, which had left me in Birmingham rather than Manchester, Lanzarote instead of Tenerife, and the bleak Newfoundland air base of Stephenville -while the meals for the next leg of the Moscow-Havana flight were waiting, uneaten, 100 miles away in Gander.
Baden-Baden, beside the Rhine in southwest Germany, is plainly susceptible to morning fog. Two Ryanair flights in a row there left me not just at the wrong airport but in the wrong country: Strasbourg in France, followed by Basel in Switzerland.
Diversions triggered by medical emergencies are more of an issue for long-haul flights. The effects of low air pressure, immobility and stress increase with distance, making a health scare more likely. Conversely, on a short hop from Heathrow to Frankfurt the small time saving of touching down at, say, Liege in Belgium is likely to be offset by the benefit of a skilled medical team waiting at the scheduled destination. While I have heard the call for a doctor several times, evidently they worked brilliantly and the flight continued as normal.
Nor have I found myself involved in the unedifying situation of a diversion to drop off disruptive drunks.
The health of the plane can disrupt the flight plan. During the brief and inglorious career of Buzz, the airline flew me from Stansted to Stansted rather than to Vienna. And the pilots of a British Airways A321 from Geneva to Heathrow were so concerned about the technical condition of the jet that fire engines awaited our unexpected arrival at Paris Charles de Gaulle, racing alongside as we touched down.
Add in the occasional need to refuel due to unexpected headwinds or payload restrictions (good morning, Guam, en route from Brisbane to Tokyo), and frankly it seems a miracle that business travellers usually arrive in the right sort of place on the right kind of day.
The actual rate of diversion, according to Virgin Atlantic, is one flight in 500; small, but not negligible. Yet there is a straightforward counter-measure that will spare your hurried apologies and avoid a stressful start to your assignment. Perhaps you are already among the smart travellers who tend to capitalise on their good fortune by tacking on an extra couple of days at the end of a business trip? Well, consider adding the fun part at the start instead.
Then if you lose half a day due to a diversion -or just a good, old-fashioned delay -you will feel merely mild irritation, rather than a professional fool.
The Independent