Eight of the strangest reasons flights have been delayed
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Here are the eight of the strangest reasons why flights have been delayed, to see the original article click here.
1) Bees -Thousands of the insects swarmed an Airbus-319 shortly before it was due to take off from Vnukovo Airport for St Petersburg. The bees came from under the wing, and crawled over the windows. But none of them got inside. Luckily. The plane was delayed for less than a hour as the bees were cleared off.
2) Crabs – People on a United Airlines flight from New York’s LaGuardia airport to North Carolina were met with Crabs. The flight left hours after its planned departure time as the crew tried to round up the crabs that escaped from the cargo area.
3) Bad spelling and bad taste – A joker probably should have avoided this one all together. Humour about terrorism near planes and airports are never going to go down well. A London-bound flight from Los Angeles was delayed for 17 hours in 2014 after passengers picked up a Wi-Fi network named ‘Al Quida Free Terror Network’. U.S. Customs and Border officials first delayed the flight for three hours as they hunted for the source of the rogue network, and then the crew refused to fly until the next day. It was thought that someone had named Wi-Fi network on the phone as a prank, though the culprit was never found.
4) Drunk Staff – Flying a plane is no quiet office job. You can’t turn up to work drunk still and hope you can get through it with no one noticing. Only one of the five crew members passed an alcohol test after passengers alerted the Police while on on an airBaltic flight from Oslo to Crete. The plane was delayed 5 hours while they swapped the tipsy crew.
5) Cockpit fight – We can imagine things can get quite tense at a cockpit. The responsibility of flying 200 odd people from one airport to another safely must fall heavy on some pilots’ shoulders. Passengers on a plane from Chennai to Paris were forced to wait for three hours after the pilot allegedly got into a bust up with a flight engineer in the cockpit. It was apparently, according to Air India, because the engineer believed a problem with the plane had not been rectified. A replacement pilot had to be called and the engineer took a chin injury away the fight. Ouch.
6) A really bad smell – Imagine sitting at the back of the plane near the toilets. But ten times worse. You may be able to imagine somewhat the terrible smell passengers taking off on a flight from Ben Gurion Airport in December 2014 were confronted with. It was so bad, it made many of the passengers sick, causing 14 crew members and six passengers to become seriously ill. The Philadelphia-bound flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Rome.
7) The pilot wanted sandwiches – A flight at Pakistan’s Allama Iqbal airport was delayed after the pilot asked the airport’s catering for sandwiches. When they told him he could only take on board food from a five-star hotel as it was approved, take off was delayed by three hours as his order was couriered over. Pakistan International Airlines had changed the menu as part a cost cutting exercise earlier.
8) An actual snak – A Mandarin rat snake was found in the passenger cabin on a Qantas Boeing 747 airliner leaving Sydney in 2013. Instead of the passengers meeting a deadly end though, they were simply delayed over night instead.
If you have been involved in a flight delay, even if its the usual weather, or crew problems etc please contact us to reclaim your compensation.
