a. Bumpy landing because Chatanooga didn’t have a runway long enough for us.
IMPOSSIBLE - Landing might have been rough but plenty of runway in Chatanooga!
c. After refueling, they started printing out plane’s documents for the pilots to check. The printer ran out of paper. For some unknown reason, instead of loading more paper into the printer, they started reprinting from scratch on a different printer.
How do you know this? Did they make some kind of announcement?
3. Arrived Atlanta about 11:15 pm. Delta wouldn’t let us have our checked luggage. All connecting passengers (most everyone) had to get in a queue and be given a rebooking paper, indicating what flights they had been rebooked on. Because we had been sitting at the rear of the plane, we were towards the end of the queue. Then we were told to “go to concourse C, goodbye”, with no more information than that. We trooped over to concourse C where we found the Delta counters were all closed. Apparently, everyone went off duty at their normal time, even though there were still passengers streaming in from our flight. We stood there like flopping fish for several minutes, wondering what to do next, when a Delta employee happened to be walking down the corridor. My sister and I grabbed her and explained our predicament. She was going off duty, but very kindly stopped to help us. She gave us hotel, phone, and meal vouchers, and explained that the rebooking paper we had been given wasn’t actually a ticket, and that tomorrow we’d have to take it to Delta to get tickets for our rebooked flight. She then went home. God knows what happened to the passengers who arrived at concourse C after us.
4. We finally got to the hotel at 15 minutes after midnight and found that the restaurant was closed and the bar stopped serving food at midnight. Needless to say, Delta hadn’t fed us any dinner. Luckily, my sister had two protein bars in her purse.
You got in ATL at 11:15pm and arrived at your hotel at 12:15am, 1 hour and you sat in the back of the plane you arrived on...pretty good if you ask me!
6. Our flight out the next day was at 9:30 pm (only one flight/day to Sao Paulo), which meant there was no practical way we could get to Iguazu Falls at all. So I had to get on the phone/email and cancel our (prepaid) hotel at the Falls (no refund)
Not Delta's fault,
cancel our TAM airline tickets from Curitiba/Iguazu Falls/Curitiba,
This is called nesting tickets and is not recommended because of situations exactly like the one you experienced. If you do do nest a ticket it is always a good idea to leave loads of time between flights.
At 30 minutes past midnight, another announcement said that the needed parts were being held up in Customs.
You may not have a problem flying on an aircraft that is in need of parts, strangely some of us do. 