Hundreds of frustrated passengers were stranded at the Fresno Yosemite Airport after Alaska Airlines says there was a maintenance issue on one of their planes.
The passengers who booked with the airline company were left waiting for nearly 24 hours for their plane to get fixed.
Their complaint? Two passengers told FOX26 News it was mainly the lack of communication about what was going on.
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They say they were finally told on Friday that it had to do with door flying open when the plane was flying over to Fresno.
Alaska Airlines provided the following statement to FOX26, “We’re working on a standard maintenance issue on the aircraft which requires a little more time to track down the right replacement part. This is not related to any doors on the plane.”
Lynn Whitesides and Jaime Holt, who were stuck at the airport finally made it to their destination on Friday around 3 p.m. They met through the inconvenience.
Both were supposed to be in Seattle as of Thursday.
“We just met each other by the way. We were booked on a flight that was supposed to leave at 4:45 pm yesterday on Thursday, a direct flight from Fresno to Seattle on Alaska Airlines,” said Jaime Holt.
According to both, about every 30-45 minutes, they would get notified that their fight was delayed.
About every 30 minutes, she says their flight was delayed.
Around 8 p.m., they were told they wouldn’t be catching their flights on Thursday.
According to Holt, they were told “Sorry, your flight has been cancelled but I hear we’re sending a new plane down and you’ll have a plane ready to go at 9:00 am on Friday morning to get you all probably close to 100 people that were here last night up to Seattle.”
But when they arrived at the airport on Friday morning, the plane was not ready to go.
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She says they were told they were still waiting on a part to arrive to fix the plane.
“Now, if we had rented a car yesterday, we could have driven for five hours last night, got a good night’s sleep and we would be in Seattle now, so it’s pretty ridiculous,” Holt said.
Around noon, Whitesides and Holt said they finally got an update from the pilot of the plane.
Both say the pilot told everyone over the intercom that they were all probably waiting on information that might not come out, so he wanted to put them at ease with what was going on.
Whitesides says he told them that the plane they were going to fly out to Seattle from, had the door flown open twice on their incoming flight to Fresno.
She continued and said he told them, “…given Alaska’s history with things flying off the plane, they wanted to make sure that this would not happen and was corrected properly before we departed Fresno to Seattle again.”
Alaska airlines provided the following statement to fox26:
FOX26 News reached out to Alaska Airlines for comment regarding the passenger’s complaints.
We also asked if there was an issue with the doors flying open. They said it was not related to the doors.
FOX26 gave them the explanation the pilot shared with passengers. They have not responded to us about it.
Whitesides says the airline only offered them a $12 meal voucher as a compensation.
“We are very happy that they made the delays to fix our airplanes so we didn’t fly unsafely, but there should be backup plans in place to prevent this from happening and to causing all sorts of undue stress on their passengers,” Whitesides said.
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Publish date : 2024-08-24 09:49:00
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