What is a"Delayed due to flight preparation"
 

My friends UA flight today from SEA to EWR is delayed for over 5 hourss due to an earlier flight "Delayed for 4 hours due to flight preparation"

What is this?

Im sure it isnt as simple as "We forgot to prepare the food for the flight" or finding an employee who can explain "Placing the small metal flap in to the buckle."?

But seriously...what is this?

Î once had a pilot explain what that meant in our situation: The plane had some maintenance done during the night-long layover, and while that was long completed MX had not signed of the work and he was consequently waiting for the paperwork to be finished. That delay then showed up with the above term...

Greetings - Dirk

I've seen it used when holding for connecting passengers and luggage as well, but never for more than 10-20 minutes.

I've seen it used for a catering delay.

It also seems to be used for an aborted departure - e.g., returned to gate due to flight plan changes (for refueling/defueling or replanning) or removal of passenger.

Aside from the aborted take-off, sounds like this term is a good moniker for "someone did not do their job."

I've also seen it used when e.g. catering was running behind, or the plane hadn't been cleaned yet. It seems like pretty good description for activities related to preparing the flight for departure not being completed on time.

Delay reasons used to be more straight forward. They seem to be more vague and utilize terms that catch-all for most situations.

Recently, I was on a plane that had a mechanical problem. A part in the engine had to be replaced. Captain did an excellent job explaining it while we waited. Understandable. However, in correspondence with 1Kvoice later on, they claimed "the issue was a broken part on the engine that was caused by environmental conditions"...which was outside of their control. Again, I get it, thats what would happen in a hail storm. But this was LAX and dont try to escape an issue by waiting until after the fact to determine another reason.

As a follow up: Well my friend told me that the pilot explained their 5 ½ hour delay was due to a “crew issue” from a previous flight….. can you be any more vague??

Anyway everyone on the plane was given a web address to click on later with a makeup offer for the big inconvenience….last night when she clicked onto it was offered either 5,000 UA miles or $100 credit toward future travel. She took the $100.

A while ago one of the UA employees posted that there are actually a lot (perhaps 100s) of delay reason codes that are each mapped to a handful of customer facing reasons. I could see such mapping being done by the marketing department with less interest on providing accurate information and more interest on providing understandable information that will generate the fewest questions.

It's even more complicated than that. Say there's a 20-minute crew issue, followed by a 4.5 hour mechanical, then a 10 minute delay because the water had to be topped off after that long mechanical.

A "reasonable person" would say that was a mechanical delay, but UA might display it as preparation because that was the last thing that happened to it.

On my flight EWR-BRU we had the captain explaining the same. Was like 30 minute delay.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I had this a month ago in PEK when another United flight had to be cancelled shortly before boarding. All the passengers on the PEK-EWR cancelled flight got dumped over to the PEK-IAD flight (actually not "all", but that's a separate issue). It meant they needed to add catering and get the bags from one plane to the other, and sort out seating.

Taking nothing away from your point, my experience is that it's usually the first 'thing that happened to it' that sticks. E.g., delayed due to late inbound aircraft, then returned to gate to disgorge a passenger, and they will only report the inbound aircraft.