About that flight delay

Yesterday, I mentioned an odd delay in my trip from O'Hare to Raleigh yesterday late afternoon.  Here's what happened.

We boarded and pulled away from the gate on time.  We were slated to arrive at RDU eight minutes early.  I had been lucky enough to receive an upgrade to First Class, where I was enjoying a pre-flight cup of Coke Zero.  Everything was looking good.

When we were well away from the gate and starting to turn toward the runway, the flight attendant started throwing paper napkins on the floor, at which point I could see water coming onto the floor in her space.  She got on the phone with the pilot and kept putting down napkins--but the water spread.  She pulled out a trash container, one of the large carts that stow under the counters in the attendant space, and it was full of water.

The pilot announced that we had a small flood in the front cabin and took us back to the gate.

A maintenance team boarded the plane and set to work.  I could hear them talking.  After a while, they figured out that the coffee maker was leaking water.  They quickly fixed the problem, cleaned the area, and left.

I figured we were good to go.

No such luck.

The pilot told us over the intercom that the end light on our left wing was broken.  They had known about this problem before, but on our original schedule we were due to land in Raleigh in daylight, so the broken light was not an issue.  Due to the flood delay, we were now due to land in Raleigh in darkness, so they had to fix the light--a process that was going to take somewhere between twenty minutes and so long we'd have to change planes.

I began rooting for the former option.

About twenty-five minutes later, the pilot announced a successful repair, and we finally took off.

Until yesterday, I'd never had a plane delay due to flooding, but now I can cross that one off my to-do list.