Spent most of Friday evening sItting on the tarmac at Bali’s Denpasar airport on a Jetstar flight headed to Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory, or at least it should have been headed to Darwin. The reason for our delay? A light was not working on my seat… I kid you not!

Okay, so I was in the emergency row (row 13 for those that care) and it was the light that is supposed to guide you to the exit in case of evacuation.

See the little orange bit at the bottom of the seat?

This was the missing light that grounded us on the bottom of my seat

2 hours of sitting on the Tarmac with the pilot and various engineers and hosties coming to check out my non functional light. I’ve never had that many people come to check out my butt! The issue was that the light cover and bulb had been knocked out and couldn’t be found. I offered to hold a torch where the light should have been for the duration of the flight but that idea was rejected as was my idea of taping a glow stick to the side of my seat…and yes, I did have one in my luggage.

The Search for the missing bits of the light was amusing. A message came over the intercom asking passengers to check on the floor around them and in their seat pockets for a missing orange disc. At that point people were scrambling to look for the light cover but to no avail. Even the Captain joined in the search by digging through the rubbish that had been collected from the incoming flight. Eventually the flight was cancelled because of the light and we were offloaded with no further information.

It was a flight full of Aussies and the mood wasn’t nasty. It was more disbelief at the fact that the flight had been cancelled because of a seat light. We weren’t allowed out of the gate area but someone had managed to find a smoking room right at the back of all of the gates so half the plane headed up there whilst the others lounged around near the gate.

Airport security is a little different in Bali to the rest of the world. The security check is at the gate area which means that no liquids can be taken past the gate and nothing is sold after the security check. This meant that none of the 200 people who had been offloaded had any liquids ie. no drinks or food.

For some reason mobile phones and Internet weren’t working in the gate area either so the people who were in the smoking room managed to tap on the glass out to the general area of the airport, get someones attention and shout through the glass to a random stranger to get a wifi password for one of the coffee shops in the main concourse. It was only because of this that some people were able to contact the people that were due to pick them up and tell them they were delayed.

Two hours after we had been offloaded some of us were finally given boarding passes to the next Darwin flight which left 6 hours after our original flight was due to depart. We were also taken to a restaurant for a meal and drink. If what we had already been through wasn’t enough, the restaurant we were taken to had a power outage so most people weren’t able to get a meal. The whole thing was like a very bad episode of Faulty Towers.

I will give the people on that flight their dues though. I didn’t see anyone lose their temper. Everyone was fairly bemused by the situation and even when we were sitting on the next aircraft which by that stage was an hour late there were no angry people. Most of the plane had become mates and were chatting to eachother. I’m not sure the situation would have been the same had it been in Europe. We finally arrived in Darwin over 6 hours late sometime after 4am. Tired! Very tired!

Could Jetstar (a budget airline owned by Qantas) have dealt with this better? The Captain was excellent in updating us every 20 minutes or so whilst we were on the plane. When we were offloaded, it was a little different. There should have been some announcements of what they were doing. The only updates we got were Chinese whispers from when a passenger went and asked. It wasn’t ideal. They did well in organising the food and drink albeit a little late and it wasn’t their fault that the restaurant had a power outage. Apart from that lack of communication on the ground, I think they did quite well. Mind you, since it was a plane load of Aussies going to Darwin had they just rolled a couple of kegs of beer into the gate area no one would have cared at all. 😉