United 84 yesterday had a massive delay forcing it to take off about 1am. At that point, they needed to take the pilots from flight 90 to operate the flight, causing UA 90 to be delayed a couple of hours until another crew arrived. When the new pilots arrived, everyone boarded and by the time they were ready to close the doors, the in-flight crew claimed they missed the deadline by about a minute (for maximum work time) and they could not take off. After a long fight with the ground staff (who claimed they should continue flight as planned), they needed to deplane (at about 4am) just to sleep in chairs (even the lounge was closed) until they can get the flight staffed at 8:30am (which eventually took off about 9:45am). These 2 delays obviously caused flights 85 and 91 from TLV today to be delayed by 7-8 hours.Btw, the above story was United, not El Al. (of course - had it been El Al, it would have been reported here at least 15 hrs ago and possibly a DDMS article too) Just saying.....
UA91 CANCELLED.
"Status: We're sorry for the inconvenience. Your flight is canceled because your plane needed repairs."
They should have kept a 747 available as a backup for times like this. They could fill it up easily.
I wonder why they don't run an extra flight at times like this. one would imagine they could easily do that.
They don't have extra planes just lying around.
