He suffered from a premature evacuation.
A Delta Airlines flight attendant accidentally deployed the emergency slide before a cross-country flight, causing an estimated six figures worth of damage and delaying passengers for several hours.
“Everyone’s entire night just became a cluster f–k,” griped one incensed passenger on Reddit along with a pic of the prematurely-deployed slide.
The slip-up and slide occurred Saturday, October 25, aboard an Airbus A220 that was slated to fly from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Salt Lake City, Utah, A View From the Wing reported.
According to AviationA2Z, said flight attendant — who was reportedly a 26-year veteran — unintentionally raised the door handle while arming the door for departure, triggering the emergency power assist response.
When activated, this function automatically forces the door open and deploys the emergency chute before anyone has time to react.
As the slide was deployed against the jet-bridge, passengers were temporarily trapped onboard until engineers manually detached the chute — a process that took around an hour.
Afterward, they reconnected the jet-bridge and allowed the flyers to disembark.
As a result of the mishap, the flight was delayed for a whopping four hours, causing several passengers to miss their connecting flights in Salt Lake City and have to spend the night there.
It’s yet unclear if passengers received compensation, although Delta did assist passengers with rebooking and onward travel arrangements, the International Business Times reported.
Repacking an evacuation slide is a costly process with figures for the Airbus A220 models clocking in at between $50,000 to $100,000, according to multiple sources.
However, industry analysts noted that the total figure could be closer to six figures when one factors in the expenses for maintenance inspections, delay-related compensation, and the repositioning of crew and passengers.
According to the aforementioned passenger, the flight attendant did “apologize and was quite flustered,” claiming that such a mishap had never happened before in his 26-year career.
Delta wasn’t about to let this one slide, however, Fortunately, industry insiders claim that the culpable crew member may have to undergo retraining rather than an outright firing, and that the airline is conducting an internal investigation to help prevent future slide-related fiascos.
Coincidentally, the slide’s hypersensitivity isn’t a bug — it’s a feature.
“In an emergency, you want ‘open door = slide goes’ with zero extra steps. Adding friction increases evacuation risk,” Leff explained. “That’s a design tradeoff that’s intentionally made to increase likelihood of quick exit in an emergency.”
He added, “Opening the door from the outside auto‑disarms, but opening from inside while armed deploys the slide.”
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