Originally Posted by
redburgundy
Too bad. We flew 886 on May 4 and departure was on time.
Checking the status of the May 5 flight it shows a 2:00pm departure time--does that mean it got delayed a day?
Yup! Just got to the Kansai Airport Washington Hotel where UA is putting us all up for the night.
We finally boarded over 3.5 hours late and were away from the gate and ready for take-off when the pilot came on and basically said something along these lines:
I have good news & bad news -- good news is we're first in line to takeoff. Bad news is I've been told by the company that they aren't sure if what the Japanese disinfected the aircraft with is approved by the FAA. They are checking with the FAA & Japanese govt to find out if we can depart.
I dunno how long we waited (probably just as well, it was quite awhile) and the answer was the Japanese couldn't say exactly what was in the stuff they fumigated the plane with and the FAA wouldn't allow us to enter the US if it had been done with stuff that wasn't approved. The pilot said that basically we were in the middle of an international incident between the US & Japanese over what they'd done to our plane.
So back to the gate for us. We waited onboard for awhile while they arranged hotels for us, then we deboarded, got a sheet of info & our immigration embarkation cards back and reentered Japan (exit stamp got VOIDed) to pick up our luggage.
One missing bit of info on sheet was how to get to the airport (which is the tall one on the other side of the bridge I think). Wasn't really anyone out to direct us either when I passed thru. After all of this I decided to just grab a cab, pay the almost $40 to cross the bridge and have a little more relaxing evening. I'll grumble at UA about this when I get back along with having to burn a comp day at work that I could have used for something else.
So what's the going rate for flight delayed a day due to international incident?