JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: Our hellish flight, herded like animals by people with no farming skills, was a perfect metaphor for a broken Britain

The secret to early morning flights, you tell yourself, is to keep your eyes on the prize. Sure, the 5am start is tough; the taxi ride to the airport is endured in wordless stoicism.

But my father and I have been down this road before. We suck in the pain and then, over a lunchtime paella in our favorite café in the Mallorcan village of Es Capdellà, we clink beer glasses and say it was probably worth it.

This time was different. This time we had lunch at Burger King at Glasgow Airport.

The £10 voucher that flight operator TUI gave us to compensate for our delayed flight didn’t even cover the cost of my burger and chips. The drinks machine was broken.

The story of the first day of our autumn stay to warm our bones in the Mediterranean sun, prior to the onslaught of winter, is a story of many broken things.

Broken systems; broken scanners; broken customer service… and there on the tarmac, a broken Boeing 787 Dreamliner that wouldn’t fly anywhere that day.

It was suddenly a metaphor for a broken Britain to see the repairman battling the drinks machine as customers queued with empty cups.

My father, who is awaiting knee surgery, is no longer the mover he was during his rugby days, so he was disheartened at 6am to see the security line snaking endlessly around parts of the airport we didn’t know they existed.

But we kept our eyes on the prize. The same thing happened when it turned out that our departure gate was at the far end. They have had travelators at other airports for decades. Sometimes they even turn them on.

In Glasgow we trudge through soulless corridors on faith. Further along is the aisle seat with extra legroom that we paid for. There are still a few obstacles to overcome. Stay strong. We’ve come this far…

Boarding began at the allotted time and I breathed a sigh of relief at my father’s knees. Maybe he’d get some sleep on the plane. They call it a Dreamliner, you know.

A little later, boarding stopped when we heard of a ‘technical problem’ with flight TOM1506. It would be an hour before they could tell us more.

I’ve known worse. We found some seats and read our papers. Lunch at Es Capdellà was not yet out of the question. We could still be in the air at 9am.

It took over an hour for the TUI ground staff to tell us more. But mysteriously the TUI app came closer. It told passengers that their new departure time was 1 p.m.

Confusion and alarm ran through the 300 grounded souls waiting at the gate, while TUI employees chatted among themselves at the counter. Good? Were they planning to tell us something?

Finally, they felt our stares and had this to say to us: Go back and start again. Collect your luggage from the baggage carousel first – we’ll let you know the carousel number as soon as we know – and then proceed to check-in with your bags and hand them over again.

After you get new tickets, go to security and do that all over again.

And so Glasgow Airport became a giant snake and ladder board for the passengers of TOM1506. We got within a strand of hair from the top, only for the tallest reptile in the game to swallow us whole and dump us all the way to the bottom.

What kind of madness was this? We were already checked in. Security had already done its job on our nerves and patience.

It seems that this is what happens when an airline cannot replace an aircraft with a similar aircraft from its fleet. In our case, two smaller ones were flown in from Birmingham and we were to be divided between them.

That is no small logistical challenge. But it is one in which passengers – who were already abandoned – had to do the lion’s share of the heavy lifting.

Back through the soulless corridors we trudged to the departure hall, then to the reclaim and then to check-in – where every TUI desk was unmanned.

Now look at it from a customer relations perspective. At one point, you would like to think, a senior employee takes stock and reflects that passengers bound for Mallorca are about to check in for the second time that morning – this time very disillusioned.

It’s better that someone comes there to meet them. Don’t leave them wandering around lost wondering what the heck happens next. We walked around, lost, wondering what the hell happened next.

The next half hour was perhaps the most depressing I have ever spent in an airport. The low point comes when trust in the common sense of others disappears and you feel like farm animals being herded around by people with no farming skills.

We ended up being among the first to receive new tickets which we took straight to the scanner gates leading to security. Our tickets have not been scanned. “Get help,” the message flashed.

We did that and the assistant tried to manually scan the tickets. He looked at us pityingly.

“This flight has already left,” he said.

I assured him this was not the case. For an easy life, he led us to the fast security, where his colleague could not scan the tickets either.

I countered her suggestion that we should go back down to check in with my own suggestion that several hundred of my fellow passengers were on their way up from there or were still queuing there. It looked like the system was collapsing.

She took a deep breath and let us through.

A few hours later, at another departure gate at a different end of Glasgow Airport, the ground staff chatted behind another desk as the clock ticked and this passenger was cooking.

I don’t hate whoever deemed our Dreamliner unfit for takeoff. These decisions should be made without the slightest hesitation if there is any reason for concern. I hate that I’m the sheep and they’re the gauche farmhands.

Stop that damn whining. Talk to us! We’re already five hours late. Will there be more pain? I didn’t detect among them an ounce of awareness of how the people around them must feel.

Frankly, it is to the airline’s credit that somewhere over the Pyrenees a member of the cabin crew reminded passengers that they were entitled to compensation for the delay. I’ll get to that.

But first let me tell you what happened when the wheels hit the Palma tarmac two weeks ago at 4.47pm. There was that familiar applause around the hut – that ‘they didn’t do the right thing in getting us here?’ tribute, unique to air travel.

‘Really and truly? What’s wrong with you?’ I wanted to say. Instead I laughed my head off.

And the compensation? TUI responded to my claim by telling me that I had already been compensated for the delay. Complete nonsense, and I spent a long time on the phone trying to make that point to a real person.

“I’m sorry,” I was finally told. “That’s an automated message.”

Sometimes it feels like the magnitude of the repair job needed is beyond our collective ability – or desire.