The first UK government chartered plane touched down at London Stansted just before 1am on Friday, carrying mostly families with young children<\/p>\n
A couple who arrived back in the UK on the first chartered flight from the Middle East said they sheltered in a car park beneath their hotel in Dubai.<\/p>\n
Thousands of British nationals are stranded in the Middle East after US-Israeli strikes on Iran prompted retaliatory strikes across the region.<\/p>\n
The first UK government chartered flight took off from Muscat, the capital of Oman, at 1.36pm GMT on Thursday, having initially been scheduled for 7pm on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The Titan Airways plane touched down at London Stansted just before 1am on Friday, carrying mostly families with young children.<\/p>\n
Amelia Reid and Samuel Sharp travelled to Dubai for a long weekend, arriving last Friday, and by Saturday evening they were sheltering under their hotel.<\/p>\n
They had travelled for more than 40 hours by the time they touched down at Stansted, where they were greeted by Ms Reid\u2019s parents and their dog Penny.<\/p>\n
Mr Sharp said: \u201cSaturday we ended up sleeping in a car park in the basement of the hotel with about 100 other people, after the alarms went off on our phones.<\/p>\n
\u201cDidn\u2019t get told if it was safe to go up or not, just went up for breakfast and I think we heard a massive bang after that, so it\u2019s just on edge, on edge for four days.<\/p>\n
Ms Reid, who had been travelling in a wheelchair, said: \u201cWe left Dubai yesterday lunchtime, went straight to the Oman border, and went on a coach all the way to Muscat airport in the hope we\u2019d get on the Government plane.\u201d<\/p>\n
She explained that after arriving at Muscat airport and boarding the chartered flight on Wednesday evening, they were told they would not be taking off because the pilot was out of hours.<\/p>\n
Another man, who wished to remain nameless, described the \u201cterrible\u201d wait for the plane to take off on Wednesday evening, before the delay to Thursday afternoon.<\/p>\n
He, his wife and young child spent 36 hours in Muscat airport, after fleeing Dubai last weekend.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cTo be honest, UAE (United Arab Emirates) government has been doing very good with the interception (of missiles) and making people safe, but it\u2019s just that I thought it\u2019s not worth any of this, even if something minor happens, especially for the family, it\u2019s not good.\u201d<\/p>\n
He drove 300 miles from Dubai to Oman earlier this week.<\/p>\n
The man continued: \u201cI think today was better, but the day before was very terrible. We took almost four hours for check-in. And then after that, we were told we can\u2019t fly because pilot is on overtime, so we had to go back to the hotel.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than 140,000 Britons have registered their presence in the Middle East with the Foreign Office and 4,000 have returned home.<\/p>\n
Muscat has emerged as a key location for people wanting to leave the Middle East.<\/p>\n
The British Foreign Office does not advise against travel to the area where the capital\u2019s airport is located, unlike the current advice for airports in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha.<\/p>\n
Muscat can be reached by road from both Dubai and Abu Dhabi with journeys of about 300 miles.<\/p>\n
British prime minister Keir Starmer revealed he had chaired a Cobra meeting on Thursday, and acknowledged that people across the UK are \u201cworried sick about their family and friends who are caught up\u201d in a war he said \u201ccould continue for some time\u201d.<\/p>\n
Fazal Chowdhury, who described himself as a \u201crisk averse kind of guy\u201d also touched down on the flight with his wife.<\/p>\n
He complimented the UK government\u2019s work despite the long delay.<\/p>\n
Mr Chowdhury, who had lived in Dubai for the last three years, said: \u201cThere was a bit of room for improvement because there were some technical issues with the flight, so we were in the airport for 20 hours, but I don\u2019t think there\u2019s much to complain about.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be honest, they were all working really hard and they were all really sincere, the whole team there were really good.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe ambassador came and explained what happened, she was really good. We\u2019re all here now, it was a bit of a shambles on the night when we thought we were going to get on the flight and then we were sort of trapped on buses and had to go back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stanley Murphy-Johns, Press Association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first UK government chartered plane touched down at London Stansted just before 1am on Friday, carrying mostly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[969,42,90179,11829,12693,3410,14396,43,47062,40,38,41,39,3791,12684,812],"class_list":{"0":"post-332558","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-hezbollah","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-iraq","13":"tag-israel","14":"tag-lebanon","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-syria","17":"tag-top-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topnews","20":"tag-topstories","21":"tag-turkey","22":"tag-united-nations","23":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}