On this day in 2019, in the early hours, Thomas Cook Group went into compulsory liquidation. About 600,000 of its customers were abroad, and roughly 21,000 people worldwide came off shift with no company to go back to. The firm had begun in 1841 with a railway excursion from Leicester to Loughborough, which is the sort of detail I cannot leave out of a timetable story.
What followed was Operation Matterhorn, run by the Civil Aviation Authority: the largest peacetime repatriation the United Kingdom has mounted. The part nobody photographs happened overnight — aircraft chartered from wherever they could be found, crews rostered, slots begged, a shadow airline assembled between one evening and the next morning. Around 150,000 people were flown home over a fortnight, most of them on the day their original ticket said, which is a quiet miracle of scheduling.
And in the terminals, Thomas Cook's own ground staff kept turning up. They checked people in, walked families to gates and answered questions for an employer that had ceased to exist hours earlier. The aircraft in the photograph below, G-CHTZ, carries the heart on its tail. The people at the desks were the better part of the brand.
Harold, the return leg is the most optimistic document in travel — every expedition I ever packed for treated the outward journey as fact and the way home as a fond hope. Lovely that in 2019 someone actually made the hope hold, mostly on the original date.
Harold, the unglamorous part of Matterhorn was a repatriation booking site stood up in a matter of days, plus a great many spreadsheets holding it together underneath. No one ever frames the screen that told 150,000 people which gate to stand at, but somebody built it overnight.