Originally Posted by
Di_Vosh
No airline will EVER make an announcement like:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome aboard our 7:00 pm flight to xxx. We apologise for the delay, but this was caused by a delay to the flight last night, which required that the crew who flew the first flight of the day to be 15 minutes late to work due to flight and duty considerations. Because we don't operate with a backup crew, we couldn't avoid the 15 minute delay. Because we have minimum turnaround times at all of our airports, we've not been able to make up the 15 minutes in the 7 sectors today that the aircraft has flown. So are 15 minutes late now, etc"
So we say "Late due to late arrival of inbound aircraft". It's NOT a lie, and doesn't burden the passengers with a lot of stuff that most of them either wouldn't understand or care about.
Cheers,
DIVOSH!
Well, on EI on at least one occasion I've heard (after boarding a delayed afternoon flight in Dublin) something along the lines of "Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the delay. This aircraft has just returned from AMS. It picked up a delay first thing this morning due to fog in XXX, which in turn led to an ATC delay on its way into AMS earlier this afternoon, and despite our best efforts it hasn't been possible to make up the time."
Now for this SLF at least, that's a perfectly reasonable explanation, infinitely better than "late arrival of incoming aircraft". Of course that level of detail may not always be available, but if it is, it does away with my feeling that basically no-one gives a damn [I'm not referring to EI here, more a general rant about uncaring customer service] and they're trotting out the "late arrival of incoming" line the way they would mindlessly say "we apologise for this 2-hour delay and
hope that it has not caused you any inconvenience..."