LarryJ

I don't know how the F/A reserve system works. For the pilots, you have field standby, short-call, and long-call reserves.

For a long-call assignment you BEGIN your 10hr rest AFTER you have been assigned the trip. You have 11:30 hours to report for a Global flight but that ensures that you are starting fresh with a full duty period available. That lead time won't work for a rescue flight so long-calls weren't available in this case.

Short-call has a report time of 2:30 then time to flight plan and preflight. The duty time limits are more complicated, though, since you're already on the hook for a phone call from the beginning of the short-call period which counts against your ultimate duty-day limit (though not 1:1). So, you may have pilots on short-call reserve who could report quickly but wouldn't have available duty time to make the round trip. You need to use short-calls who have only just started their short-call availability period. That's would be why pilots could time out while waiting for F/As.

Field standy is on-duty at the airport but also have the duty day limitations and they are staged to cover specific ultra long-haul flights where the a relatively short delay can cause the original crews to time out (such as EWR-HKG) so, by the time the need for the recovery was known the field standby's were either gone or didn't have enough duty time available for the round trip.

It wasn't just the pilots and F/As that were needed. They sent mechanics to fix the airplane, ramp workers to handle the passengers and ground ops, blankets, hot beverages, and food. That all had to be collected and loaded.

None of this starts happening until you know that you need a recovery flight. Initially, you think you'll fuel and go. Then you have a maintenance problem and call out the contract mechanics. If it's not business hours the contract mechanics may have to come from home which takes time. Then the mechanics evaluate the problem and attempt to fix in. In this case, the initial problem was not the door being frozen shut. That happened while they were working on the initial problem.

Immigration must approve passenger deplaning and will monitor to ensure that uncleared passengers don't enter the country. From news reports, that didn't occur until the next morning and, at that time, passengers were allowed to deplane in groups of about 20 passengers at a time.

Contract maintenance would be the first mechanics to look at the problem. If it is something that they can't handle then the airline will send company mechanics, tools, and parts.