Wondering if anyone else has had this happen. I was on CO flight 152 IAH - EWR yesterday (8/17). The plane backed away from the gate on time (app 11:45am) headed for the runway and then stopped, after a few minutes the pilot announced that they had left a catering cart and were contacting the company to see if they had to go back to the gate. Some more time passed and the pilot announced that they were going back to the gate to pick up the catering cart. This whole process took an hour to accomplish, we then took off and headed for Newark. An hour from landing at Newark (near Washington, DC) the plane started to go into a holding pattern and soon after it was announced that we would be diverting to Cleveland. I believe had we taken off on time and not gone back for the catering cart, we would have landed before the weather hit Newark and not had to divert to Cleveland.

Turning around a fully loaded 767 and delaying the flight an hour for one catering cart, has to be one of the oddest calls I have ever seen by an airline. I am trying to rationalize why Continental felt that having a full compliment of catering carts on a plane was more import than getting 170 plus passengers to their destination on time. The flight crew was very good at parroting the company line that this was a "weather related" delay to passengers who were asking about their connecting flights (luckily not me). In my opinion this was not a weather related delay, it was a catering cart delay, CO and the CO employee who made this decision is solely responsible for inconvenience that was caused to the passengers on board. We luckily didn’t get stuck in Cleveland overnight and arrived at the gate in Newark just before 9pm.