A group of young Scottish musicians are stranded in Lourdes without their instruments, after they were lost by British Airways.
The volunteers arrived in the French town to discover that their drums, keyboards and microphones had been scattered around the globe, in Texas, Russia and Oman.
The incident is the latest in a series of baggage failures this summer by BA, which at one stage was facing a backlog of 20,000 missing items.
The latest victims are a group of 70 teenagers from the St Margaret's of Scotland youth group, Glasgow.
They are in Lourdes on a week-long trip to assist the archdiocese at its annual pilgrimage, by performing music for the sick.
Last Thursday they flew to Toulouse from Glasgow, via Gatwick, but arrived to find 23 bags of equipment were missing.
Five days later they are still without 11 bags of equipment, and the group is set to return this weekend. Michael Canning, 49, group leader, said it would be a miracle if they received the instruments in time to perform.
He said: "We are utterly powerless to do anything about this.
"The musical equipment is a vital part of the work the young people are here to do.
"As well as playing concerts to entertain the patients, their music is an integral part of the liturgy during mass. We have been told that our equipment is dotted round the world."
Yesterday, the group performed music at a mass healing and at a garden party. The concert was able to go ahead only after they managed to hire replacement equipment locally.
Tour operator John Tangney, of Tangney Tours, Kent, has been helping the group by co-ordinating efforts to retrieve their instruments.
Mr Tangney said: "According to the BA baggage tracker, one of them is in Muscat, Oman, one is in Houston, Texas and another is in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
"When I rang Toulouse I got a message saying the tape had run out on their answer machine. At Gatwick, the BA baggage line said they were too busy to take my call."
The errors are the latest in a series of embarrassing failures by BA this summer.
Last weekend, 4000 bags were stranded at Heathrow after a baggage belt failure. At one point as many as 20,000 bags were missing.
Last Friday, British Airways reduced the number of bags to 5000 after sending many to Milan by truck for sorting.
After the latest failure, a British Airways spokesman said: "We apologise to the band for the disruption in their set and to the individual people whose instruments did not arrive. We understand how disappointing that must be."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article