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View north somewhere south of Iceland |
Boarding for AF83 was delayed by 20 minutes today. Once we were on the plane nothing happened for another 20 minutes or so. Then the announcement: "There is a problem with the brake system. We're working on it. Please be patient."
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After an hour they gave us the option to leave the plane as required by US government regulations. I think that's part of the passenger bill of rights. Of course, if you leave the plane, you need to take all your belongings and if you're not back in time when the doors close, tough luck.
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A little while later they announced that they will turn off power for 10 minutes. In other words, they rebooted the plane. Very comforting. One of the stewardesses later explained that there was a maintenance done in Paris before the inbond flight to SFO, that changed a bunch of passwords, and a component of the secondary brake system that was worked on in San Francisco, did not come back online in that system environment. "The Airbus 380 is a modern, computerized plane, and just like modern cars with all their computers have problems all the time, so does this plane", she said. Oooooh, that's comforting.
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Once that was done, everything was working properly. Yay!
However, we sat at the gate for another 30 minutes or so, because one passenger indeed left the plane and didn't reboard, so they had to unload that passenger's luggage. We finally took off with 2 hours delay.
Since my lay-over to Athens was only 90 minutes, I knew I'd never make it anyways, so I didn't fret about it. In the worst case I'd spend the night near the airport and travel to Greece the next day.
We made up some time along the way and arrived at Charles de Gaulle only 80 late.
Once I got through arrival procedures, got a new boarding pass for the 18:55 flight to Athens, and made my way to Terminal 2F, I was greeted by this sign:
It's nice to know that Air France has its priorities right. They offered a meal voucher for being late and me having to kill a few hours at the airport.