Was scheduled to fly Alaska's flight 828 from Kona to Oakland at 3:35 pm on Saturday, July 14. After what we thought was going to be a short 20-30 minute delay, the ground crew came over the loudspeaker to announce that the crew was running late and that we would have updates coming soon. The announcement was sufficiently vague that I got a little worried that something epic was up.

A few minutes later, the real details were shared - the flight crew had been traveling in a shuttle to the airport together and some sort of extinguisher was inadvertently triggered. There was enough of a medical concern that the Alaska insisted that the entire crew be transported to the Kona hospital for chest xrays and medical evaluation. No idea how long the delay would be so they started handing out meal vouchers. Initially, we thought that we might just be delayed a few hours, but it soon became clear that the flight might not go on Saturday at all.

I have to saw the the ground crew was super-friendly and efficient under the circumstances. Given that this was Alaska Airlines and a Hawaii flight at that, there were not a lot of frequent flyers on board. I immediately grabbed an agent when it became clear that the delay would be significant and asked to be backed up on the United redeye flight leaving from KOA to SFO later that night. She acted quickly and was happy to make the accommodation. I was traveling with my parents, husband, and three year old, so we really wanted to get out asap. The United SFO flight wasn't very full, so I started sharing that info with fellow passengers who were going back to the Bay Area as a final destination and several of them were backed up as well.

Flight was eventually cancelled about an hour later, with an indication that it would be replaced with a new flight 23 hours later (Alaska only flies that route once a day, so there was no room to accommodate our entire plane on other scheduled flights). Most of the passengers got hotel vouchers and were reasonably okay with spending another night in Hawaii. It certainly helped that this was a Saturday flight and most people presumably did not have to be at work the next day and could survive a full day flight delay. As for me, I managed to get out on the United flight to SFO, tired and battered with a cranky three year old. But we did pretty well under the circumstances. The United redeye was far from full, so apparently a lot of our fellow passengers either didn't know about this flight or were happy to take a full day delay.

I rarely fly Alaska, but the whole experience does make me somewhat less likely to fly this flight again to and from KOA (I've always flown United on the KOA to SFO route, so this was an experiment). This time around, I happened to be lucky that I got a gate agent who helped me out and that the United flight happened to have enough seats to accommodate our group when things went wrong. But given Alaska's low frequency of flights and the unavailability of a replacement crew for a full day, I'd be concerned in the future about being stranded by Alaska. At least United would have had options for me to connect in LAX or HNL if necessary when things went this wrong. And presumably they would have had more backup crew in the area to call upon, which would not have necessitated a 23 hour flight delay in the first place. Curious to hear the thoughts of others on this...

All in all an interesting flight delay. Grateful that I've been lurking on Flyertalk long enough to know to be proactive in this situation and get myself home!