Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
How did it take three hours from deplaning the first aircraft to departure if DL quickly found another A330 at SEA, towed it to the gate, etc.?
From SEA, I'm surprised that the FAs who opted not to fly your flight weren't put onto other flights where they still would have been legal rather than just being allowed to go home. Plus, many FAs seem to like to bid for international routes around holidays because those with less seniority can get interesting trips then to places where they otherwise wouldn't have a chance.
Scheduled departure time was 2:43 pm, optional deplane right around 3:40 pm followed by the mandatory deplane around 3:50 pm. When I got off the plane the new scheduled departure was 5:30 pm. The new plane was towed to A13 (next door to A12, our original gate) and got there at about 4:30 pm. I guess it took some logistics to get the required permissions to get the plane to the gate. It was already "groomed", but took some time for FAs to perform their checks. Ground personnel then physically moved headsets and some other equipment to the new plane by walking inside the terminal while catering then moved all of the food and beverages via trucks. By the time the flight was ready to board, it was about 5:15 pm. It was actually a pretty quick board, and around 5:45, the captain let us know that all is good but the plane had no fuel and it was going to take a long time for that load to get the necessary fuel. At approximately 6:45 pm, we had the fuel, but then were waiting on some calculations due to the increased fuel load. Finally around 7:30 pm or so we were airborne.
As for the FAs, agreed, it's interesting, but I guess there were no other IRROPS going on at SEA and they had folks on reserve. The crew was a very interesting make up, as the new crew's FAs were all Asian except for the lead FA. There were two Cantonese speakers and one Mandarin speaker (per the lead FA), although one of them seemed to struggle (no clue which was which).