The Collapse of Zoom Airlines: A Sad Day on Both Sides of the Atlantic
By HARRY MCGRATH
EDINBURGH - It's not a good sign when you finally reach your airport departure gate and find a high ranking police officer with gold braid on his cap and a pair of Glasgow's finest standing in front of you.
But on August 28 at Glasgow Airport, the stars were misaligned from the start. The Zoom Airlines check in, normally the work of 10 minutes, was moving at glacial speed and, for long periods, not moving at all.
My colleague Graeme Murdoch and I were heading to Calgary and then on to Vancouver to promote a project called "This is who we are" which is linking communities in Canada and Scotland through the medium of digital photography, with a particular emphasis on those with the same names like Calgary, Banff and Airdrie.
Our schedule was tight with a live CTV interview the following day and then the Calgary and Canmore/Banff Highland Games where we were to promote the project and present letters of greeting from Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond.
After an hour or so, we got to the check-in desk and were told to "run, run" to Gate 28 because we had been transferred from the Calgary/Vancouver flight to the Halifax/Ottawa one which was now going on to Calgary - but would be leaving in 30 minutes. When we reached the gate, nobody was there.
Wandering around, we spotted a sign at another gate for Zoom to Halifax and found a room full of passengers in various stages of depression and the aforementioned representatives of the local police force.
From the window our Zoom plane was in view, but like some recalcitrant school student, it had been moved to a corner of the airport and made to stand by itself. In the departure lounge, we all crowded around a man in a yellow jacket.
He flapped his arms for a while and finally yelled in a broad Glaswegian accent: "Dinnae ask me any more questions. Ah'm no wi the airline. Ah'm wi the wheelchair company!" Then he unfolded a wheelchair and wheeled it through the exit.
Soon many of the people hoping to travel to Canada with Zoom were moving from bar to bar on an airport pub crawl. Every two hours for the balance of the day, airport authority designates called us back to say that everything was under control, that things were being put right, that there would be another update in two hours. However, the one bit of information that stuck was "the plane has been impounded".
In this Internet age, it wasn't difficult to find out more than we were being told. From all corners of the bar, the news flowed. There was a Zoom plane grounded in Calgary, another in Gatwick, the one that is supposed to have arrived in Glasgow from Vancouver hadn't left Canada.
"It's all going to be fine," said our spokesperson, "there's a flight taken off from Cardiff. Zoom is back in the air." But the internet told us it was actually the passengers that had been taken off in Cardiff and put back in the terminal building.
After 10 hours, we gave up. There was a special rate available at a local hotel which you "might" be able to claim back from Zoom. The homeless and the incurable optimists took the offer.
The rest of us fielded texts that said Zoom had collapsed and ceased trading. We could still see our plane from the window. The late evening sun reflected off the word "Zoom" on its side but it clearly wasn't going to zoom anywhere. The plane that was to take us to Canada was blocked in by a snowplough.
By 7 PM we were at Domestic arrivals to pick up our cases. By now we knew each other's stories: the woman who was going to her sister's wedding in Ottawa; a family who had saved for years for a holiday on Vancouver Island; two guys who were to bike around Cape Breton; an elderly Scottish couple going to see their grandchildren, perhaps for the last time; and, the glummest faces of all, the resident Canadians with no idea how they were going to get home.
Back in my Edinburgh flat 14 hours after I left and with my case unpacked at my feet, I read the horror stories from elsewhere. There are Scots stranded all over Canada, Canadians in Scotland; people in London, Paris, just about everywhere Zoom flew.
Zoom is the first story on the BBC and dominates the Scottish news. There are Gaelic choirs and fiddle orchestras who were heading to Cape Breton and now won't be going, and old age pensioners who paid for their flights in cash or by debit card and therefore aren't eligible for credit card refunds.
I have been flying between Scotland and Canada for 25 years and I remember every cut-price airline that has come and gone in that time.
They ranged from Wardair with their excellent steaks wrapped in bacon and silver cutlery service that didn't prevent them from being bought out, to Nationair which used to refuel in Gander, Newfoundland, let everyone out for a cigarette in the freezing cold, and couldn't get the doors open when they landed in Prestwick.
And yet the end of Zoom still came as a complete surprise and, despite the sad fiasco on the final day, I can't help but mourn it.
Zoom's demise felt personal. It was a Canadian company, run by a Scots-Canadian with a particular emphasis on flights between Scotland and Canada.
Zoom was instrumental in forging closer ties between the two countries and supportive of many ventures, including some of my own, which were intended to enhance those links.
I flew Zoom many times between Scotland and Canada and always had good experiences. Its airport line ups were like "old home" days with familiar faces and, more often than not, friends on the same flight.
This time I was due to return with Zoom from Vancouver to Glasgow on September 24 and know of six other people who were going to be on that flight, one of them making her first trip back to Scotland in 40 years.
Zoom won't be replaced anytime soon and it's a blow to Scots-Canada no matter what way you look at it. I for one will miss them.
[Harry McGrath is the Chairman of Cultural Connect Scotland www.culturalconnectscotland.com.]
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