Originally Posted by zombietooth

I have this happen several times (about 3.2 million miles on UA), most of them during a period when there were lots of long delays after pushing back from the gate (10-12 years ago now, maybe?). I remember one flight from ORD, where we sat on the tarmac for over 3 hours, at which point there was a near mutiny of the pax. Many people were screaming that they had missed their connections and just wanted to go back to the gate, and the crew were trying to keep the rage under control. Finally, the Captain pulled us back into a gate and offloaded 30-40 pax who were really PO'd. I decided to deplane also because I had booked myself on another carrier while sitting on the tarmac, knowing that we were going back to the gate, and I really needed to get to Japan the next day. It took a while for our bags to be recovered, but I made my DL flight with about 30 mins to spare and got to Japan just about the same time as I would've if I hadn't missed my UA connection.

I remember several of these incidents in that period, although the one above was the worst for the abuse that the flight crew was subjected to, and I was literally thinking that someone was going to rush the FAs and try to open the main door-such was the level of tension on this particular flight.