When a catering snafu meant no meals onboard, British Airways faced a choice: delay the fight to properly cater it or buy several buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and serve that instead. British Airways chose the KFC option – but should we be heaping praise on BA for being so clever or scorn on BA for failing to properly provision for a flight duration of over 12 hours for many of the passengers onboard?
Transatlantic Meal Service On British Airways: One Piece Of KFC
The catering snafu occurred in Providenciales: it was discovered that the locally-catered meals had not been properly chilled. As a result, crews determined that the entire meal was unfit for consumption. That left nothing for passengers on the 12-hour journey from Providenciales, Turks & Caicos (PLS) to London, England (LHR) via Nassau, Bahamas (NAS) onboard BA252.
It would have been one thing not have anything to eat for the 399-flight from PLS to NAS, but the journey to London was 4,342 miles.
Thus came the choice: take a catering delay so a flight kitchen in Nassau could re-create enough meals for a Boeing 777-200 jet or just buy what was available in the terminal and get the flight moving again.
The choice was made to avert the delay and ground staff went shopping…coming back with about 300 pieces of chicken from KFC.
In the air, each passenger was offered a single piece of chicken. If there were leftovers, an additional piece was offered.
@British_Airways just landed @HeathrowAirport after a 12.5 hour flight BA252 from Turks and Caicos with no catering! BA had to serve @kfc at Nassau giving some lucky passengers 1 piece of chicken. The container with the plane catering wasn’t chilled so all thrown away!! pic.twitter.com/U5IcBD2hRy
— Andrew Bailey (@aktivandrew) July 24, 2023
Praise Or Curse For British Airways?
The answer is both.
I do commend British Airways for recognizing that most onboard probably would rather skip an airline meal than be late to London.
And while I have not had KFC in many years, I would have to imagine it is better than nothing at all, especially when you are hungry.
On the other hand, British Airways must make it right with passengers. Even if the caterers and not BA itself messed up the meals in Providenciales, they were contractors for British Airways and BA failed to deliver a reasonable expectation onboard.
I hope passengers are not insulted by paltry compensation that only covers the value of the meal onboard. Rather, this constitutes a glaring service failure. British Airways could make it right by offering a generous voucher for future travel to all onboard passengers (and a particularly sweet voucher to Club World business class travelers).
CONCLUSION
I’m one of the few odd ducks who would have preferred a delay for proper catering over the KFC. That said, I recognize my uniqueness here and I praise British Airways for offering something more substantial than packaged crisps or cookies. Passengers tend to be forgiving as long as communication is transparent. I suspect most are quite happy to have given up their meal to reach London in a more timely manner. Even so, it is only right that British Airways compensates every passenger on the flight.
(H/T: One Mile At A Time)
Not the first time an airline has served KFC. I was served KFC on a JAL flight around the Christmas holidays–in a KFC box, so it was all planned. I think there is something special in Japanese culture about eating KFC at Christmas; sort of like Americans at Xmas with Coca-Cola.
You’re completely right.
I remember back in 2017 my flights got cancelled and I had to stay in Tokyo a few more days. Some of our my then-employers’ partners invited me to their home for Christmas and it was definitely interesting having cake and KFC for Christmas.
According to a friends who are Japanese, they say that when KFC entered Japan in the 70s, the ad campaign was KFC for Christmas and that became so popular that it became embedded in the culture. Also a similar story with Japan’s Christmas cake, but it happened after WWII and it was with bakeries.
TBH, Japanese style fried chicken is muuuch better than what you’ll get out of a KFC box.
Exactly! I’ll take Chicken Karage anytime over KFC!
I’m shocked a KFC actually had this much chicken available. The units seem to be out of product all the time, but maybe this was a better operated unit in a terminal.
Isn’t this some kind of cultural appropriation? Why aren’t the demlibs outraged?!
The only one here looking for something too be outraged over is you, it seems.
It seems to me that the aircrew made the best of a crap situation and did what they thought was the best solution. Think about it, what exactly were there other options here?
“attention folks, we don’t have food so the flight is delayed till we have food”
“Attention folks, we don’t have food so flight is delayed till tomorrow”
“Attention folks, we don’t have food, so please buy food before boarding or you won’t eat anything till we land”
“Attention folks, we don’t have food, please select an annoying passenger to be eaten alive”
Attention folks, so we don’t have food so we bought everyone KFC since they were able to cater the flight. We hope you enjoy the chicken
I never eat that greasy crap, not on the ground and certainly not in the air. I would prefer to go hungry or get my calories from alcohol the entire flight.
@Chi Hsuan
Don’t eat the greasy stuff and even the thought of the cabin odor makes me queasy. And unless they all had the hand wipes every handle, button etc would be disgusting.
I’d take a 3 piece box with cole slaw and mashed potatos on UNITED any day instead of what they serve. Oh, and make that all dark meat.
Brilliant, if you ask me.
For better with KFC then stuck at the airport.
As noted about, might be better than what’s passes as a first class meal as of late.
KFC looks, and is more likely, more delicious than the “perfectly edible” and “quite acceptable” (Matthew’s words) UA meals in J.
I’ll take fast food birds over anything remotely British.
The comment from the airline sums it up very well:
“We apologize to customers that their full meal service was not available and we had to wing it on this occasion,” the airline said. “We’re sorry if we ruffled any feathers.”
What about passengers with dietary restrictions who cannot consume chicken? Vegetarians, vegans, pescatarians, Halal, Kosher, etc.? Is this story a joke? I cannot imagine BA doing that here in the UK and getting away with it, given the hygiene and food safety requirements airlines have to follow in Europe. Also, how many KFCs did they go to in order to get enough chicken for 300 people? How did the crew pay for it? Do they all have company credit cards? Some of the elements of this story are difficult to believe. I fly BA all the time and have never seen this kind of thing happen.
Damned if you do, damned if you dont… Had BA cancelled the flight, then surely a whole lot of passengers would have been irate at the delay and missed connections. A meal is a meal. Basically, flyting is about safely and efficiently getting from point A to point B. All the rest are frills, bells and whistles. OK, so it was unfortunate but not the end of the fricking world. I had warm sparkling wine once on United and was not outraged. These are totally first world problems of absolutely no consequence in the greater scheme of life. Kudos to the flight crew’s quick thinking and hopefully BA will make it right with points/vouchers or some other tangible proof of their sincerity in this unfortunate – but hardly life threatening – incident.