A flight attendant reportedly made an expensive mistake over the weekend when they accidentally deployed an aircraft’s emergency slide at the gate.
The incident occurred on Saturday, October 25, aboard Delta Air Lines flight 3248 from Salt Lake City (SLC) to Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT). When the Airbus A220-300 plane was at the arrival gate and the aircraft door was being opened, the flight attendant accidentally deployed the emergency slide.
Before takeoff, flight attendants “arm” cabin doors, which means they’re ready to immediately deploy the evacuation slide the next time the door is opened. Upon arrival, cabin crew “disarm” the doors, meaning the slide won’t inflate when the door is opened for deplaning.
In this instance, it seems that the crew might not have properly disarmed the door before opening it at the gate. A traveler on board the plane posted about the incident on Reddit. "He did apologize and was quite flustered, cited over the 26 years of career, it never happened," the original Reddit poster, SF-Coyote, said in the thread. According to the post, it took crew about an hour to detach the slide and let passengers off the plane.
The airline said that passengers scheduled for the next flight aboard the aircraft, which was a return flight to Salt Lake City, were rebooked on alternate Delta flights that evening or the following morning. The airline also put up passengers in hotels for the night if it was necessary and apologized to customers for the delay.
Incidents like this can cost the airline a lot of money—not only to rebook passengers but also to deal with the slide, which can range into the ballpark of $20,000 to repack and repair.
Although it was quite costly, inconvenient, and slightly embarrassing, the incident should bring some safety perspective to passengers. Inflatable aircraft slides are designed to be ultra-easy to deploy so that in a true emergency, crew can immediately unfurl them for a quick and safe evacuation. So even if it might seem like a flaw to design them with a hair-trigger inflation mechanism, it’s of the utmost importance to err on the side of a few accidental deployments in the name of safety.
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