airmotive

Rather old story, but I still remember it clearly...
TWA 727 in Orlando. Sitting on the ramp having just finished boarding. The woman sitting behind me says, “Hey! There’s nobody driving that truck!”
Sure enough, I look out the window and an unmanned tug is making its way across the ramp in our general direction, and not a single person on the ground seems to notice. People start pounding on the windows trying to get someone’s attention on the ground, but nobody notices. The truck disappears under the wing, and a couple seconds later we feel the plane rock.

DiverDave

Ah, the old Piedmont puddle jumpers.

zymm

I've had a flight delayed by a cleaning crew that took much longer than expected to clean the plane it was used as a charter by the Chicago Bears, that's probably my best one

carolinaflyr

This probably doesn't rise to the entertainment or ick factor of toilet malfunctions, but I had a "Here's your sign" series one morning with Delta recently. Flight 2620, ATL-SLC on 2-21. Plane was apparently in for service the previous evening. It was sent over to the gate arriving after T-40 but some minutes before departure. But, oops, they forgot to clean it. Apparently no one told the gate or whoever in operations schedules such things. No cleaners were scheduled. All cleaners were for a bit otherwise occupied. So, we wait for cleaners. Eventually, maybe T+20 or so, we have a clean plane, and we board. Oops. Now the crew notices, the plane is uncatered. Of course, no one had bothered to tell the gate or whoever at operations schedules catering. So we wait. and wait. For catering. By voice tone, pilot is pissed, probably wondering which idiot in operations thought to send a plane uncleaned and uncatered with no plan to accomplish either. Eventually, after catering, at maybe T+75, we depart. I do have to say, though, that consistent with my observation that Delta usually does excellent fumble recoveries, when we arrived in SLC way late with about 25 pax expecting to transfer to a flight to RNO, scheduled to depart in 10 minutes, not only did the gate agents at SLC not close the RNO flight, they managed to get every passenger on board, to close the door at only T + 5 and successfully transferred all bags (that last, especially, was some great airport choreography).

Occupationalhazard

As it turns out, "Idiocracy" wasn't a comedy, it was a warning.

In the "worst delay" category, I was on a flight to CDG over the winter holidays where we got all the way out in line to take off when two girls decided they were too sick drunk to fly. Never mind that they had OCEANS of time to figure this out during boarding, or better to decide NOT to get loaded before flying. So we had to take them all the way back to the gate and wound up landing in Paris 2 hours late. It screwed mostly everyone with connections, but it turned a 3 hour layover for me into a 1 hour layover, so I did make my gate...just as boarding started, but pretty much everyone else missed theirs.

O/H

bennos

I fly out of a lot of congested airports, where gate to 10k feet can easily be an hour. I always make sure to hit the restroom about 5 minutes before the door closes. But I don't drop my phone in the toilet...

Great thread, but sadly all my delay stories are basic WX or MX. Let's see what happens later this week...

kitkat77

Catering truck hit the plane. I've never heard a more disgusted pilot announcement about it, either.

HWGeeks

LAS to JFK circa January 10th 2008

The flight attendant announced we would be delayed due to a sick pilot. Dude looked horrible I was scared the entire flight

Annalisa12

Not this airline. A mouse spotted on board. Was a near midnight departure from Bangkok or KL. Can't remember. Once the delay was announced 80% of passengers ran to the lounge and anybody was let in. It was crazy. I complained that people were in here that shouldn't be. I had a DYKWIA moment and said I pay a lot for the privilege to be here in peace. Next thing I see is staff going around the overcrowded lounge checking eligibility and 75% of people start leaving. I then ask for a blanket, have them dim the lights and music and have a sleep on the sofa for a few hours. Mouse not found so put on a different plane.

ty97

I was on an AA flight to LGA last month that diverted to PHL for snow and spent the night in PHL, continuing the next morning to LGA (missed the last train to NYC by just a little bit alas). Boarded the same plane with the same crew the next morning for the hop to LGA but something had gone wrong with the plane, so they deplaned us and moved us a couple of gates down to another gate/plane. That plane had not been catered yet and only had water/coffee I think. Crew asked if we were going to need anything else and we were like "nope, let's go".

ty97

My brother was about to board a flight on Friday when they stopped boarding to a bird in the cabin. Thankfully were able to get it out relatively quickly.

David Carabetta

My most recent memorable delay was due to a delay on the inbound flight. They reported to have accidentally boarded 2 people onto the plan that were supposed to be on a different flight. And they didn't figure it out until they had started to taxi and they then had to return to the gate to allow them to disboard for their proper flight.

I had a delay due to a missing safety sticker on the wing. Required waiting for replacement of the sticker as well as inspection from a 3rd party to confirm the new sticker was in compliance.

PV_Premier

Not on DL, but on the ramp in LNK one time, headed to Denver on UA, when the rampers went to pull the little radio cable out of the plane (the one they use to talk to the pilots when they are pushing back w/ the TUG) they ended up yanking the entire bracket out of the side of the plane so that it was just hanging there by the wire.

Last flight of the afternoon on a Friday, and it cancelled for this, so back to my dorm I went...and had to take the 6am flight the next morning. This was already supposed to be a quick weekend trip to see my girlfriend at the time, so only ended up getting one night of out it.

There was still one arrival that evening from Denver, so they flew in a mechanic who wrote it up to FAA standards or whatever, and then they flew the jet back to Denver empty that night for repairs.

nystateofmind

On a CRJ-900 between PBI and JFK that was already delayed a few hours there was a further delay because the fuel gauge was not matching what the fuel truck was saying was loaded onto the plane. They had to manually stick the tank to see amount of fuel on board. I once had a delay on a flight because someone on a preceeding flight decided to swipe the safety information card and so they had to find the right safety information card to replace it.

Zorak

I got them to turn a plane around and go back to the gate because they hadn't loaded any soup.

(Ok, not really, but it was more amusing to think of it that way -- post 99288 and following in the Lounge thread)