Return Air problems

On the return leg of a vacation trip, the flight was delayed. At the first delay, the flight crew said they were experiencing maintenance delays. A warning light was on, they tried a fix, and were waiting to see if the light would turn off so they could sign-off on paperwork and take off. Then, it was announced the fix did not work. Next, the flight crew announced they were going to completely power down the plane, including the lights, and power back up to reboot the computer. Sarcastically, I hoped they weren't running Windows, thought they should try downloading updates or uninstalling any recently applied updates. The flight was deplaned (off-boarded?), we were told the warning system was inoperative, they were to try working on connections, restarting the computers again, more testing, and let us know within an hour. I guessed a recently passed passenger's rights bill might have affected how they handled it (de-boarding the plane as opposed to sitting on the plane for another hour).

The flight crew or attendants tried to reroute as many people with connecting flights as possible. They spoke of the option of vouchers for hotels at both ends of the trip, rescheduling flights, or catching the later flight. I was told that although the expressed the possibility of catching the later flight, that flight had 7 open seats but 10 on the waiting list. They ended up sending a plane across from Newark, maintaining the same flight number, and this resolution suited me. As an apology or thank you, we received coupons for a discounted future flight, a "premium beverage", and we received free satellite programming (movies) for the flight.

I would not say I was upset and felt they did their best to help us. It was one of those situations where I felt getting upset, annoyed, or off-put would not help and would just make things worse for myself, the other passengers, and the airline's employees. Others did not feel this way, and I don't know if I would have felt the same had this been the beginning of my trip, not the end. I felt the airline handled themselves professionally and the coupons were nice, but the behavior of some was embarrassing. I don't know the accuracy of the information I received, but I tried to transcribe it above accurately. In other words, I imagine that the maintenance passed the information to the pilots (perhaps indirectly) who passed the information on to the flight crew (kind of like the message passing game). This is the first time I've experienced this kind of delay, and I was interested in capturing it.