Mountain Explorer

Pilots noticed a cracked headlight cover on this A333. Maintenance was called and captain allowed folks to reenter the terminal during the wait. After 90 minutes, repair was successful and we were good to go!

Except no one paid attention to which passengers had deplaned, therefore, crew did not know who was onboard. After several huddles, they decided to unboard everyone and immediately re-board and scan boarding passes. Passengers were told they could leave their stuff on the plane.

After unboarding everyone, crew realised they didn't have enough time left to complete the flight. More huddles. Reboarding cancelled until a new crew could be found.

DL computers started rebooking folks thru other hubs. Except people had left their stuff on the plane so that didn't work. Finally, the gate agent started escorting 1 passenger at a time onto the A330 to retrieve their stuff. I'm not making this up!

Eventually a new crew was found and we left 4 hours late

davetravels

Hopefully, you ultimately settled into a nice, cozy lie-flat!

Zorak

Wow, that's... special. You have my sympathies!

javabytes

How does this happen? Clearly someone in SFO can't be bothered to rub two brain cells together today...

audidudi

My question is this...is a cracked headlight cover considered to be an MEL item that must be replaced before flight? And how was this replacement part for an A333 sourced as I'm sure there wouldn't have been one laying around at SFO!

readywhenyouare

Well, if anyone here parked their car at SFO and comes back to a missing headlight you'll know what happened to it!

jrl767

I'd guess it depends on whether "headlight" is the taxi light on the nose gear strut or a landing light elsewhere on the airframe, and whether the light will actually function with a cracked lens

davetravels

A couple of years ago, I was sitting on a plane awaiting some sort of a mechanical fix. A guy with absolutely NO noticeable uniform boards with a small cardboard box. Someone said they wondered who that was. I said.......

Advance Auto Parts!

That said, even if DL doesn't have the right part on hand, don't the airlines trade or sell parts to each other when needed? It would make sense to me.

audidudi

Only AA and DL fly the A330s, and neither has a maintenance base at SFO. Perhaps it was flown down from SEA or up from LAX!

davetravels

Surely some foreign Airlines fly A330s into SFO? Where do they get parts?

readywhenyouare

Perhaps I should start carrying aircraft parts in my carry-on luggage and sell them to Delta if we have a problem at an outstation.

TheBOSman

There are only a few carriers that do, HA and EI both do fly A330s to SFO, maybe MU. Probably missing a couple, but any others would be small operations, 2x daily max (likely not more than 1x daily). Guessing none of them have a big supply of spare A330 parts lying around there though, and of course the carriers hubbed there, UA and VX, don't own any A330s and definitely don't have the parts at SFO.

davetravels

Well, you missed Wow Air flights to KEF!

Mountain Explorer

It was a light on the front of the wing, just a few inches away from the fuselage. The captain (who did a great job providing updates) said that there's a maximum allowed crack length to fly, and that this crack was an inch too long. There were no parts available but he said that maintenance was able to "seal the crack"

Mountain Explorer

This in general has been my experience with DL at SFO. I'm a big fan of DL but the SFO team is very poor at planning ahead. I've lost count of the number of times my 767 or A330 flight to/from SFO has had a long wait or a diversion to another terminal at SFO. Not because of a lack of gates, but because DL had parked little planes in the widebody-accessible gates and forgot that a big plane was coming.