CX - 7 hours at the gate

[KnowItAll]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGSLQIDEN1.DTL

Audio Interview: http://cbs5.com/video/?id=24289@kpix.dayport.com
TV Coverage: http://cbs5.com/video/?id=24300@kpix.dayport.com

Nearly 400 passengers were stranded aboard a Cathay Pacific Airways jet for more than seven hours Tuesday at San Francisco International Airport, adding yet another planeload of angry consumers to a growing industry backlash.

Passengers boarded Flight CX873 to Hong Kong just after midnight Tuesday for a 1:20 a.m. departure. But the Boeing 747 never left the gate.

"We sat there three hours before they said anything," said Mark Valenta, a newlywed for whom the flight was to have been the start of a dream honeymoon to Asia. "Then the PA system went down, the lights were going on and off, babies were crying. It was a nightmare."

And it lasted the entire night.

It wasn't until 7:30 a.m. that the flight finally was canceled due to equipment problems and passengers disembarked.

[Crocodile]

Hmmm.... not good.

Reminds me of a story that, although is slightly different, is definitely the Flight from Hell. I had done this flight a few months earlier, but on time. Everytime I am on a flight that is slightly delayed, I just remember the poor people on this NYC-Melbourne flight. A scheduled 23 hour flight (refuel in LA) is not something to look forward to, but this just gets crazy .... enjoy the read!

http://www.theage.com.au/news/nation...151816806.html (2 pages)

From the article:
"Hell" was the extraordinary time it took flight 108 to travel from John F. Kennedy Airport to Melbourne, a journey that normally takes 23 hours. We should have got home at 9.25am Tuesday, not 7.30pm the next day.

Perhaps it was not the kind of "disaster" to be mentioned in aviation annals but from the outpourings of apologies from Qantas area managers, to the unaccustomed frankness of frustrated pilots, it was a public relations fiasco.

[KnowItAll]

Well, atleast they were not on this continental flight which had sewage flowing down the aisles.

http://www.king5.com/topstories/stor....1cc511cf.html

[PDLM]

Personally I don't really see what CX did wrong here - planes break and in my experience (*) CX deal with it better than most.

(*) In the last couple of years an unplanned overnight in Jakarta and going to Manila via Cebu in the middle of the night.

[Lammarite]

Keeping people sitting on a plane for 7 hours would be a good starting point for where they went wrong.

[hullexile]

Lets carry on with horror plane journeys...

Colleague of mine flying from the UK to Hangzhou, via Amsterdam and Beijing. Arrived at Beijing late after the long flight to be told the plane was overbooked. He complained and they eventually gave him a ticket and told him to rush to the gate as he only had a few minutes. Ran on to the plane just in time. When he got to Hangzhou he realised it wasn't - he was in Nanjing. He had not looked at his ticket in Beijing because of the rush and they had put him on the wrong plane. At Nanjing they put him on a public bus for the fun 5 hour night ride to Hangzhou. He does not speak Chinese and no one on the bus spoke English. Same problem when he got to Hangzhou bus station - could not get anyone to understand him to get a taxi to the hotel. Arrived 10 hours late, but still laughing. Luckily I was there so I could arrange cover for the next day's work and buy him several beers.

[PDLM]

(To Lammarite) Er, nope. I disagree. If they felt they had a reasonable chance of fixing the problem then keeping the people on the plane until the crew went out of hours was the best thing to do.

[KnowItAll]

>> Keeping people sitting on a plane for 7 hours would be a
>> good starting point for where they went wrong.

You do have that, oh so special, talent of pointing out the obvious.

[KnowItAll]

You'd think their mechanics would have figured that some hydraulic pump needed to get replaced -- quickly enough and not after 7 hours of hammering away at it with their monkey wrenches.

[Lammarite]

(To Lammarite) Er, nope. I disagree. If they felt they had a reasonable chance of fixing the problem then keeping the people on the plane until the crew went out of hours was the best thing to do.

Bollocks- there is no excuse for keeping people sitting on a plane for over 7 hours.