Life doesn’t always make sense. If you don’t believe me, pop over to the Trip Reports forum where JapesUK is covering his trip to Bucharest and posted photos and comment on the incident at the time. He was in 1C, I was in 2D, so we both had reasonably good views, and we chatted during the course of the bus transfer to T5 that the incident necessitated.

As I recall it was fairly uneventful until it became, er, eventful. The flight was crowded so some people’s baggage had to be taken off to be checked into the hold. We later learned that two cases removed this way had no passenger name on them, which might or might not be relevant to what followed. Thereafter:

1. Boarding complete announced. Door closed, jet-bridge pulled back (I believe but am not 100% certain), Captain said we’d be ready to go in a couple of minutes;
2. Lead cabin crew gave order to arm doors, this was done and then the manual safety demo started;
3. Flight door opened and Captain emerged. Rather than interrupt the demo he went to main door and started fiddling with it himself;
4. Captain announces there will be a delay because the slide deployed. Admits it is entirely his own mistake - apparently someone needed to get on the aircraft so the jet-bridge had been reattached and he thought he knew the procedure for disarming the door;
5. Series of announcements of varying degrees of hilarity as BA Operations procured steps, buses, an alternate flight crew, another A320 etc. Captain passes down aisle giving personal apology and explanation to us all. He is quite clear that it was his own mistake;
6. We are offloaded using steps at the back under police escort with firefighters everywhere. We are bussed to a remote stand at T5;
7. In accordance with S*d’s Law, BA get us to Bucharest just under 3 hours late.