Jokestar.
Had a flight back from Fiji Wednesday. Booked extra leg room etc.
Hurtling down the runway to takeoff, flight comes to a screeching halt. Back to the terminal we go. Apparently there was a wasps nest that prevented full air intake.
How in the hell is your maintenance program so poor that you don’t see a wasps nest forming? They don’t form in 5 minutes FFS! How many flights had been at risk of a serious incident previous to this one??
So they cancel the flight. Here’s where the fun starts.
Stood in a line for 2 hours. Finally get accomodation at what I can only label Kerobokan State Prison. I swore I could hear Schapelle screaming for help. Room had a concrete slab for a bed and I swear the bed was infested with fleas.
But here’s the kicker. We go to get dinner. Jetscab have kindly limited all our food and drink to $30. No alcohol allowed. The menu had 2 items. Chicken nuggets and chips or fish n chips. The chicken nuggets tasted like chicken feet and beaks.
Meanwhile, I’ve now copped extra costs like an extra nights parking at the airport, taxi cost back to Nadi airport etc. And jetscab are basically saying not their problem.
i fix planes for a living, you’d be surprised how quickly a particular type of wasp can build a nest mate. There’s been a warning in place for brisbane airport for a while for everyone to be aware about them as there was an instance 10 or so months ago where in under an hour a full nest was built around a pitot probe (the thing that lets air in to give you air speed indications) and thankfully noticed when a pilot was doing his pre-flight walk around on the jet. Airports near mangroves and mud are notoriously rife for that sort of shit (Brisbane)
Lucky your pilot picked up on it on the take off roll, the flight management computers would have lost their shit if he had of pressed on and got it off the ground. The computers rely on airspeed for fuel burn calculations, as well as all the stall warning bullshit they’d have going off in the cockpit.
Not sure what maintenance support Nadi would have for jetstar, if you’re relying only on a pre flight walk around by a pilot, missed shit like that can happen. There’s been fatal instances where alfoil tape was still in place over static ports (they basically give height indiciations to the drivers) after a wash and missed by everyone as the walk around was done at night and metal tape over a metal round port was hard to see by torch light . they’ve taken off and their height indications were all kinds of f**ked up and crashed.
Your scenario completely sucks mate, but it honestly could be far worse (see above).
