At first it sounds like a typical case of bad behavior aboard airplanes.
The Mexico City International Airport acknowledged in a statement Friday that a man had opened an emergency exit and walked out on a wing of a plane that was parked and waiting for takeoff Thursday.
The airport said the man had been turned over to police.
But dozens of fellow passengers signed a written copy of a statement saying the airline made them wait for four hours without ventilation or water while the flight was delayed. According to photos of the statement posted online, fellow passengers said he acted “to protect everyone, with the support of everyone.”
I think this framing is extremely disingenuous in the title. It’s the same kind of bullshit that resulted in the misframing of the McDonald’s hot coffee suit.
I’ll never ever understand why they do not simply let the passengers deboard the aircraft, nor why consumers put up with this kind of shoddy treatment. The terminal is right there. Let the people wait out whatever bad weather or maintenance issue the airline is having in the comfort of the terminal.
To demand anything less is simply a failure in logistics. The customer should never have to sit on a plane for any longer than an hour without it taking off once boarding is complete and the doors are sealed.
I always told myself I’d be the guy to do this if I ever found myself in a similar situation. To be honest, I’m not sure I could go for nearly 5 hours without the plane taxiing. 3 hours would probably be my limit before I decided it would be preferable to spend my time in a jail cell rather than an airplane.
What I’m wondering is what they’d do if you told the flight attendant you’re having chest pains and a shooting pain in your left arm. They’re not going to want to hold a person on board who may require emergency medical treatment. You might not make it back on board that particular flight, but with that kind of delay I’d probably just rather rebook anyway.
Yeah, they’d take the plane straight back to a gate and pass you off to EMS. And then leave without you.
If they have a six hour delay, I probably have some padding in that timeline. They’d hook me up and say “It’s just a panic attack, here’s some O2” and send me on my way. Then I’m either getting back on the plane, rescheduling with the ticket desk, or hitting up a bar and heading home until tomorrow.
I’m not sure why deplaning passengers would cost more money. The flight crew and terminal operators are still working throughout the period. The one thing I can see oosssibly causing an issue is going back to the terminal and u loading the luggage, but it literally happens every day. I can’t see it taking more than about 30 minutes based on my experiences.
The staff that was boarding the plane may be working on boarding other planes now. The gate may no longer be available and taking one may require coordination with another plane and that could also cause delays to the other plane. The ground staff needed to get the plane to the gate would be needed again. There’s plenty of staff that’s not in the plane that’s needed that are probably busy working on other planes.
I took a flight from Miami to LA. A bachelorette in the back of the plane had a panic attack (alcohol may or may not have been involved) and we had to stop in Austin to drop her off. I can’t imagine what it cost to do that or what consequence she may have suffered. Traveling is stressful for everyone but starting out with a four hour unexplained wait had to be unbearable.
Talking completely out of my rear end here but whenever something like that happens it is usually a liability issue. Neither the airline - let alone the crew want passengers anywhere outside their plane after boarding. There’s a billion things that could go wrong if they left the plane. The crew could have likely fixed the issue with free drinks or something like that but then again, liability…
Deboarding happens all the time. Passengers board, malfunction detected, everyone is taken off the plane. There is absolutely no liability to deboarding.
The only issue was some manager’s bonus was at risk if they didn’t have 100% departures.
It seems a bit odd to me that the crew would stick up for some manager this much. Especially since the plane did not depart in time either way. I’m leaning towards something going wrong with the communication between the airport and crew, resulting in them having no permission to deboard the plane but your guess is as good as mine.
Yeah, businesses really need to understand that their ‘procedures’ don’t trump passengers’ pragmatism.
4 fucking hours? I’m surprised more people didn’t join him. That’s an honest load of bullshit.
Is everything fucked after the pandemic? I’m from India and I’ve heard some very bad stories about both plane and train travels.
Flight tracking sites confirmed that flight AM672 to Guatemala City was delayed for 4 hours and 56 minutes Thursday.
The flight to Mexico city from Guatemala city, is a 3 hour trip. Those people had been waiting for nearly 5 hours just to take off.
because of a maintenance alert on the plane, the captain had to return to the gate for the required maintenance.”
Inconceivable that a safety check was requested after the people were on board and the money-for-services was exchanged.
A video apparently recorded aboard the flight showed passengers fanning themselves and asking a flight attendant for water.
Yea no, I thought we all agreed this was stupid penny pinching tactics.
I got stuck in a similar situation flying out of Venezuela when I was 15. It was a group trip and circumstances wound up being that all the adults ended up on a prior flight that left on time, like 20 minutes before ours was supposed to. We were on the tarmac in Venezuelan summer for 5 hours for the flight to Miami. We had air, but no AC and they wouldn’t provide food or water for… reasons? It was fucking brutal. I can’t imagine not even having air…
Happened to me coming out of Hawaii too. Four hour delay for maintenance. We had working blowers, but no AC; The air from the blowers was warm and humid after probably ~15 minutes. And just like you said, no food or water service from the attendants until we’re in the air.
Then we get through the maintenance, and the pilot comes on and (sounding very annoyed) goes “so I’ve just been notified that I have to do a fat stack of paperwork before we can leave. Looking at this packet, it’ll probably take me about an hour. We’re just going to deboard the plane for now so we can all get some fresh air. Go ahead and leave your luggage stowed since we’ll be right back on as soon as I finish this. Go hit the Chilis while you wait for me to finish this maintenance packet.”
Fuck. At least they let you deboard. We didn’t get any information about what was happening and I never found out what the delay was. Could have been a crash in the runway did all I know.
Plenty of systems require operation to know if they are functional or not. So it’s pretty easy to think of ways that the aircraft can indicate a malfunction when it’s first leaving the gate with passengers aboard.
That doesn’t mean it is any less shitty.
Yeah, you can’t really say “we started the engines but #2 wouldn’t start, so we’re continuing to the destination on one engine”. Delaying/cancelling the flight due to a safety/maintenance issue is perfectly legitimate.
The issue is that after that, a) passengers are entitled to compensation depending on the delay, and b) you need to provide food/water/aircon or take the passengers back to the terminal.
dozens of fellow passengers signed a written copy of a statement saying the airline made them wait for four hours without ventilation or water while the flight was delayed. According to photos of the statement posted online, fellow passengers said he acted “to protect everyone, with the support of everyone.”
“The delay and lack of air created conditions that endangered the health of the passengers. He saved our lives,”
wow airlines can just do whatever and if you don’t like it the cops will beat the shit out of you
Here is a list of people who were sold seats on an airplane, then threatened with violence and arrest when it turned out the airline didn’t have the seats to sell. One woman tried to use a seat she had purchased for her 2 year old instead of her teenage son for whom it was originally purchased. She was told that if she didn’t give up the seat that they would take custody of her kid from her. Another woman bought a seat for her child, and then the airline just sold the seat out from under her to a standby passenger and told her “too bad”. She said she was afraid to speak up because the last time she had seen other passengers who insisted on actually getting what they paid for beaten up and dragged away by police. Don’t worry though, instead of giving her the seat she purchased they gave her a lei.