I am sorry but 2.5 hours is actually quite quick to deplane everyone after this kind of problem. It is stated in the article that the aircraft had left the gate and had to return, so basically the whole flight was boarded, departed the gate, encountered a technical problem which would have then taken a bit of time to troubleshoot before a decision to return to the gate. Engineers onboard who would try to rectify the problem before saying it is a no go. Then amongst all this you have to arrange to return the passengers to the terminal, I once had a FOUR hour delay whilst a major international airport management decided where we could offload our passengers to as they had all cleared international immigration and would need to be processed inbound again, problem was that their was only a minimum of customs and immigration in the terminal due to no significant arrivals or departures during that particular time. I just can't understand how these sorts of things become 'news' stories, are modern day passengers infact treated so well with a very reliable service that they think it is the end of the world when a normal occurrence like a technical fault delays their travel??
A passenger had a go at me about 3 months ago as we had to return to the terminal as our destination had closed due to unforcast fog, she accused me of lying stating that 'her sister who lived about 45km from the destination airport couldn't see any fog'!! How do you please these people!! Perhaps the jetstar flight should have just ignored the fault and carried on
