So we boarded the BA 706 last night (16th) from LHR to VIE, all on-time for the 18:55 departure and then the usual announcement from the captain, "welcome on board, my name is, pleasure to be flying you" etc, then the dreaded "we are already to depart
but....."
I've heard a few of these "we are ready to go, but" announcements before but never "the water pressurisation system does not seem to be working so the toilets will not flush" He went on to say, "we have an engineer coming over to tweak a valve and this will take a few minutes so thankyou for your patience"
Said Engineer duly arrived after 10 minutes and proceeded about his "valve tweaks", going from the front loos to the aft ones and flushing each one and looking more and more puzzled as he went from one end of the aircraft to the other a few times. After almost an hour with the repeated tweaks not working we then had a full power off reset of the aircraft with the cabin plunged into total darkness for about 10 seconds
Still no joy so the Captain announced "we do have a plan B folks, I have requested some bottles of water and to use the toilets will involve being issued with a bottle to tip down the toilet before you flush". Cue lots of puzzled looks in the cabin, particularly from the ladies
So the water arrived and in the end we departed from the stand around 20:10 and airborne about 20:20. I recall us touching down in VIE about 2250 local time meaning an airborne time of about 1 hour 30 minutes compared to the 1 hour 50 minutes the captain announced before the loo delay. So I wondered, is it really possible to make this much time up on a short flight?
All in all, a frustrating delay but handled very well with frequent updates from the flight deck and a good plan B once it was clear the Engineer was having no joy with his tweaking ^