Ever delayed a flight?

[justinbrett]

I was flying from MEL - PER on Qantas, the last QF flight of the night at Melbourne.

I had just driven 3 hours from Sale and was happily in the club and hour before indulging in some rum & cokes. Then the club paged me, told me to go to the service desk.

Being the first time I was paged I went to the reception desk instead - and the dragon chick was telling me it was the service desk that were after me - and that 'I'd better hurry up, your aircraft is waiting for you and you are going to be off loaded'. I tried to explain that the aircraft wasn't scheduled to depart for another 30 minutes, and the TV screens supported this. She wouldn't hear a word of it.

Anyway, I went to the service desk and all it was they wanted to move me so two people could sit together (was a full flight).

I have been paged at the gate by Virgin once. I was sitting 10 metres away finishing my coffee, so it wasn't a big deal. I was watching the gate the whole time, I would have boarded maybe 45 seconds after the last passenger - and there were other people they paged. I might add this was a work trip and I didn't pay for the fare. I'd never pay for Virgin.

 

[Maca44]

Never delayed a flight, but missed four so far. On three I was returning from Auckland to Sydney, and the other out of Brisbane. All due to extended lunches being extended even further.

 

[TravFF]

My beloved and I managed to inadvertently delay our flight from KL to Shanghai earlier this year - though it was (mostly) not our fault. We'd arrived from Melbourne with a couple of hours to spare before the connecting flight left so we found the nearest map of the airport, located "G" section which correlated with our boarding passes (issued in Melbourne) then found the nearest benches. Being in peasant class and not privy to the hallowed lounges, the beloved stretched out on the bench for a nap whilst I stayed awake to watch the carry-on. Woke her up with about 40 minutes before the flight so she could freshen up in the bathrooms before boarding - they hadn't called us yet so we had plenty of time. Or so we thought....

Strolled to the gate. Problem was - the gate was not there. What the? Turns out that they'd changed the departure location and brought forward the time of depature - which we only realised when we went back to check the screens. We were still reasonably calm until the info desk told us "they're in final boarding call and you need to take the train". Oh ****!! A train? We didn't even know a train existed there so had visions of a 15 minute ride across a suburb or something equivalent. Of course it turned out to be a 2-minute ride to the other terminal but in our panicked states it felt like 15 minutes anyway.

Got off the train and since I'm the faster, I sprinted at a lung-bursting pace to the gate to hold the plane whilst the beloved ran as fast as she was able to. We were the last passengers to arrive and they indicated they were ready to push off from the gate as soon as we were seated. We quickly found our seats with everyone watching us (though it was probably just because we were so red-faced from exertion rather than embarrassment). So far, so good, we'd not delayed the plane - we still had one minute to go.

Then we found that there were two Chinese gentlemen sitting in our seats. It subsequently turned out that there was a Chinese tour group in the plane and the guide travelling with them had simply started reorganising where people sat in the plane. The flight staff checked our tickets and when they discovered the guide had crossed out the seat numbers for his two tour group members and written our seat numbers in pen instead, it was clear we were entitled to the seats. When they went to the original seat numbers printed on the now displaced passengers' tickets, they found those seats were occupied with two other people not on the tour.

They'd gone to their seats and found them occupied by different tour group passengers so had taken the nearest available seats. In the end, about 10-12 people had to move seats as they progressively moved down the chain of mis-seatings until finally everyone was in their pre-allocated seats. The tour guide was not particularly happy with this arrangement and would not sit down despite instruction to do so during the safety demonstration. Finally someone from the coughpit came down and spoke to him sharply (it was in Chinese but clearly translated to something along the lines of "sit down or be thrown into the jet engines") and finally we got off the ground 10 minutes late.

In the end, it was kind of lucky that the tour guide had moved his people around because then everyone was giving him the evil eye rather than us.

 

[kevinwong]

i reckon everyone could be issued with a paddle and those that delay the plane be given a seat down the back ...

lol :mrgreen: now there's an idea...at least it'll relieve some stress for the remaining passengers in a humourous way...i just hope i never get put in a position where i'm the one responsible for the hold up...