My flight arrived 28 hours late

Peter Greenberg TODAY Travel Editor • Profile

Earlier this week, Wichita State University issued its annual Airline Quality Rating study. Not surprisingly, most airlines did not fare well. And, not surprisingly, the airline industry was quick to respond.

"The vast majority of customer service issues arise from weather and congestion flight delays," said James May, president and CEO of the Air Transport Association, a trade group. He also blamed an inefficient air traffic control system.

Certainly weather and air traffic control have played a big part in airline passenger frustrations.

But I would argue that flight mismanagement, unrealistic scheduling by airlines and unreasonable connect times between flights are the real culprits.

Consider Delta Airlines Flight 16 on April 1.

Flight 16 is the longest long-haul flight in the Delta schedule, officially listed at 14 hours nonstop, but because of wind conditions, often longer. It goes between New York and Mumbai, India. It's a Boeing 777 that starts in Atlanta as a shuttle flight to New York's JFK, and then continues on the 7,056-mile nonstop to India.

This is a story of mismanagement, stupid and unnecessary decisions, delays, cancellations (not one, but two), anger, frustration and expense.

On April 1, I arrived at JFK three hours ahead of the scheduled 9:55 pm departure time for Flight 16 on a connecting Delta flight from Los Angeles. And 45 minutes before flight time, I headed to the gate.

And that's about the only thing that was on time for the next 48 hours. That's when I discovered we would be late boarding. Why? Ground crews had not completed catering and cleaning the aircraft.

Finally, at 10:30, we were able to board. Twenty minutes later, we were strapped in, ready to push back. Well, not quite. Apparently there was an electronic glitch. In about five rows of coach seats, the inflight entertainment system didn't work. And that also meant the flight attendant call buttons were inoperative. In technical terms, this call button issue is not a part of MEL (minimum equipment list of items that are absolutely required to be working in order for an aircraft to operate). Despite this, a decision was made to fix it. "This thing happened on this exact same plane last month," a flight attendant told me." Not heartening news. We were then told we'd have to wait about an hour for someone from Panasonic to be summoned to the plane.

I went up to the cockpit and asked the captain whether flight attendant call buttons were on the "no-go" list. "No, they're not," he replied, shrugging. "But that's what Atlanta wants to do."

So we waited. By 11:20, it was determined the system could not be fixed and -- and confirming that this was not a No-Go item" we pushed back from the jetway -- nearly 90 minutes late. But our problems were just starting. Because of the ground delays at the gate, we now found ourselves in the world's longest conga line. The captain apologized and said we were number 75 in line. That's right, 75^th for takeoff, from one runway at JFK. Now it was time to do the math. Based on a time separation of 3 minutes per aircraft take off, we'd be out there quite a while. As we waited, I noticed plane after plane leaving the line and returning to terminals. The reason: They had waited so long they were short of fuel.

For our flight, that was a good sign. We got to move up in line. But moments later, that's when we got the bad news. At 12:40 am, nearly three hours after our scheduled departure, the captain informed the passengers that we'd be returning to the gate as well. Out of fuel? No, out of time. The crew had now "timed out." They had exceeded their legal on-duty time limits and could no longer fly the plane to India. We returned to the gate.

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