Emergency Slide Deployed by Flight Attendant - Costs Delta Six Figures

To err is human, but due to the consequences, it is understandable that some people may prefer to avoid certain professions. Unfortunately, that is not the case for flight attendants.

Delta Airlines Flight 3248 was scheduled to depart Pittsburgh for Salt Lake City. According to a post from the Delta community on Reddit by user SF-Coyote, “takeoff didn’t quite go as planned.” One posting to the site, under the username SF-Coyote, explained that the flight attendants emergency procedures were not followed and one of the slides was deployed. This delayed the flight, and the distorting of jetbridges left multiple customers on the flight unattended to for several hours.

Surprisingly, this mistake did not take much effort to fix. The slide needed to be staff-controlled for a 60 minute period and the jetbridge would have to be rearranged to allow the customers to of the aircraft for their “4 hour” delayed flight.

As the saying goes, “Time is money.” Most seasoned travelers know this, and Unfortunately, Salt Lake City was the “gift” for those customers. According to “View From The Wing” there were “numerous” travelers and “customers” on the flight that were documented to have stayed and missed the flight connections.

Given that the airline did not mistake, Delta had to pay for those passengers to spend the night at a hotel. View From The Wing estimates the cost of repacking and repairing the emergency slide at 20,000$. The source notes that by the time the airline accounted for additional expenses such as hotel rooms, repositioning, crews and paying for the mistake, it likely crossed the 100,000$ threshold.

The flight attendant apologized to the passengers and was reported as flustered, stating this was the first time in his 26 year career such a thing had occurred. Let's hope for everyone's sake, it's the last as well.

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