Pilot Has Unusual Candor
I took United Express flight 5755 this morning from Atlanta to Dulles for the second time this month to make an early morning meeting at the client. It took the flight attendant a few tries to lock the door for departure with multiple calls from the cockpit interrupting the safety talk to perform another attempt. We backed out of the gate five minutes early - good news. Then we returned to the gate a few minutes later with a message that the flap controlling computer was not working - bad news.
What ensued was a roughly four and a half hour delay while they attempted to change out the flap controlling computer(s). When we finally reboarded and backed out of the gate, the pilot announced that the flap computer had been switched into maintenance mode the night before and had not been switched back to the normal mode. So, the pilot admitted that a four and a half hour delay was fully preventable and human error. To me, I did not think airlines would admit this level of fault and just say, hey, we fixed the computer. Is this level of candor common to United Express pilots?