That's wonderful that the plane was there for over an hour. I am willing to bet large sums of money that the crew didn't CHOOSE to wait until the last minute to try and solve the problem. Most times the crew doesn't arrive at the airplane any more than 20-30 min prior to departure. Once onboard we do our pre flight checks and when the FA is done, the gate agent boards.

So you can see that it very well could have been the crew wasn't aware of the issue until shortly before boarding. At that point, unbeknownced to you, they probably started to track down the card. This isn't something we would delay boarding for, because normally we would have been able to track one down.

So what you as passengers see is only one TINY piece of the puzzle. There are lots of things that ocurr that you have no concept of. HAving said that, it's a little irritating to assume the crew should have done something earlier. I wasn't there, but I've been in many delay situations where the passengers complain why we didn't do anything sooner. It just isn't that simple.


AZJ