JetBlue Flight 278 Fiasco

UPDATE 10:19AM – Everyone here is so super-pissed. Apparently, there’s nobody in the bay area who can help us out in under 12 hours.

UPDATE 9:15AM – at 7:48AM, we seem to have collectively received an update from JetBlue via email. Thankfully, we all received a compensation. Unfortunately, the compensation was insulting. We were each offered $50….for a 12 hour delay. That’s a complete joke.

UPDATE 5:14 AM – I’ve been told by another passenger that we may be receiving compensation when we land in Fort Lauderdale. Still no formal announcement & no guarantees…

UPDATE 4:42 AM – Troy, the manager here on the ground, just dropped by to chat with me for a few minutes. I really appreciate that and want to emphasize again that the JB team here did a lot of things right tonight. Yes, this should have never happened in the first place, customer service could have been better, communication about how folks would be re-accomodated and compensated should have been crystal clear, but I think that this was a good learning experience for this team and that they carried themselves well. I’m happy that even though people were mega-pissed, people treated one another with respect… for the most part. It is, however, pretty clear that the JB staff here was not empowered by JetBlue (corporate) to make this situation better in a timely fashion.

UPDATE 4:11 AM – The current situation is that we’ve all been made an offer to get on our plane tomorrow morning, 12 hours after our original flight time. The only forms of compensation that have been formally offered are:

$8-$18 in meal vouchers inside SFO (of course nothing is open right now and nothing has been open for hours). Some people only got $8. Somehow, I qualified for $18…
Snacks (Animal Crackers), sprite, apple juice, and bottled water – although this took several hours…
Blankets and pillows for the dozens of people who are sleeping at the terminal inside SFO tonight.

What we haven’t received is:

Proper accommodations for the night.
Any answers about how & why we got into this situation.
Any guarantee that we’ll be treated fairly after we all get to our destinations.

Oh – I just found out that the person who’s performing the wedding I mention below was also on our flight and might not make the wedding…I hope she and her family make it on time! Congrats to the bride & groom btw – you won’t forget this story!

So as of right now, our original flight 278 has been cancelled & we have a new flight, 8078 (same plane), that will take off at 11AM (although it’s already been delated by 30 minutes…somehow). Effectively, we’ve been delayed 12 full hours and have only been given a few bucks as compensation.

The Story:

Flight 278: a red-eye from San Francisco (SFO) to Fort Lauderdale (FLL). It really has turned into a red-eye…We were supposed to depart at 11:28 PM, Wednesday Oct 17. We didn’t.

The flight was delayed about an hour. That’s par for the course these days. What’s not par is that 140 people, including at least 10 children under 10 years old, get on a plane (slowly might I add – no one else turns planes around like Southwest Airlines…) and then don’t take off. After we pushed back from the gate, we sat on the runway long enough that I actually questioned whether I’d fallen asleep and if we were in the air or not. I opened the window blind and sure enough…we were not in the air. A few moments later, the captain made his first announcement (after over 25 minutes of zero communication) and said that there was “an issue” and we’d have to return to the gate. And so we did. Once the doors were opened, the captain emerged and said that there was a member of the crew who was not eligible to be a part of this flight team.

uhhhhhhhhhhhh……what?

Let me take a minute to say that…

I DO REALLY APPRECIATE the hustle of the individual members of the JetBlue team that are here on the ground in Terminal A12 at SFO. There are 150 really stressed out & frustrated people as a result of this screw-up, but I feel like everyone did a pretty good job of remembering that we’re all human beings here and that we are all entitled to be treated with respect. Yes, voices were raised, and lots of people are really tired and pissed off. But there is a team of maybe 8-9 people now who are here busting their asses to keep us happy. While I can’t say that it’s happened fast enough or that people are even remotely satisfied with the current outcome, I can say that folks here appreciate what the individuals on the ground here are doing to make things better.

However, what I don’t appreciate (or understand) is the following:

How this happened.
The extremely slow response rate from JetBlue.
Alleged attempts to prevent @jetblue from tweeting with me and others here.
It’s really cold inside SFO. What a huge waste of energy.
They can’t shut off that blaring message about un-attended baggage… so every 3 minutes everyone gets woken up.

1) How this happened.

Apparently, if we’d taken off, JetBlue would have eventually broken the law by having one of their crew members in the air for 13 minutes over the number of legal flight hours (by FAA regulations crew members can only work for 14 consecutive hours before they must take a break). Okay, I get that – the FAA created these rules for a reason: consumer safety. And the pilot made the right decision to follow those rules. But 1) How does this happen? 2) Why was there was NO BACKUP PLAN? How could an entire flight be de-railed by something this simple and foreable? What does that say about the way JB runs their risk mitigation & situational planning? 3) How come a single member of a flight crew couldn’t be replaced in under 12 hours? If the pilot hadn’t turned the plane around and brought us back the gate, we would have had a gross negligence situation on our hands…and I’m not convinced that we don’t still.

2) The extremely slow response rate from JetBlue.

Okay, after we got back into the terminal, 140 people lined up to talk to the 3 JB staff members who were part of the ground team. Chaos. The really crappy part was they had no answers. They couldn’t tell us anything meaningful and they were telling us different things. Instead of standing in line with everyone or calling 1-800-JETBLUE, I sat down and laughed at the chaos for a minute. But then I started to empathize for the woman next to me who was going to miss a day with her 94 year old grandmother… or the large party of 20-somethings who were headed to Nassau in the Bahamas for a wedding…which they may or may not be present for. Hopefully, the best man makes it there in time.

So I did what any entrepreneur does and tweeted at JetBlue. And to my surprise, I got a response (which I appreciate). It’s disappointing, however, that the folks here on the ground weren’t empowered by the corporate office to take appropriate action and make this situation better in a relatively timely manner.

3) Alleged attempts to prevent @jetblue from tweeting with me and others here.

This one was weird. 2 people came up to me after I spoke to one of the staff here on site and told me that instead of helping frustrated customers, he was on the phone with someone in corporate trying to get them to stop tweeting with me. I didn’t see this personally, but the fact that two separate folks walked up to me – a total stranger – and told me similar stories, means it probably happened…which is a bit concerning. However, I’m glad that @JetBlue has continued to stay in touch with me! I wish that we were making more progress faster though.