Originally Posted by Joe1690

After we boarded the plane, the captain and the crew announced the real reason for the delay. It did have to partially do with weight and balance but primarily the issue was that one of the 8 emergency exit doors was inoperable so they had to reseat everyone in front of that exit and behind it. It was the left emergency exit door rear of the wing (so door 3 if counting from the front of the plane on the left side or door 2 if counting from the rear of the plane on the left side).

Sometimes it's easier for the pilots or mechanics to explain to the gate agents to block the seats for weight and balance issues than trying to explain what is going on with maintenance as the situation is often times fluid.


I am still a little confused as to how we were able to fly with 7 of 8 emergency exit doors operating since I thought passengers had to have doors in front and behind them within so many feet of each seat in case the other exit was blocked during the emergency but I guess this is not the case.

The FAA approves what is called a Minimum Equipment List (MEL) that allows operators to dispatch and safely operate with inoperable equipment as long as it's repaired within a certain time frame. In this instance the MEL probably called for those seats to be physically blocked to ensure they could not be occupied. The FAA prior tested the plane with this door inoperative and allows for its MEL.

In addition, the plane I believe may have had other mechanical issues since the plane was really having issues during the final 20 minutes of decent including shaking left and right, pitching up and down, flying speeds that seemed to be slower than normal during the decent. We were only going 160 mph when we were at 10,000 feet which when I have always flown into PHL on an A330 in the past we are usually going about 200 mph - 240 mph at that point. In addition, when we landed the onscreen display said our altitude was 110 feet high while it usually says 0 or within a few feet of zero.

This would be virtually impossible for your to ascertain from your seat or from the inflight GPS screens. What your seeing in the air is your ground speed, not what is displayed on the flight deck screens. If they were doing 200 knots indicated and had a headwind on approach, you will see a much slower ground speed. The wing of an airplane does not care about ground speed, just the speed and angle of attack of the relative wind. Often times when approach control is saturated they will slow you to 190 knots even at 10,000 feet. With a good headwind, you are only covering the ground at Cessna speeds. The pitching and rolling is just turbulence, most likely from those high winds aloft.

A very interesting experience to say the least including a passenger throwing up 10 minutes after takeoff. I prefer less eventful flights whenever possible but realize that is not always possible. The flight attendants were great and took all of these things in stride.