Well, that’s not supposed to happen.
A Delta Air Lines flight from New York to Los Angeles diverted to Salt Lake City on Saturday after the pilots noticed a potential issue with one of their instruments. While on the ground, the Boeing 767’s emergency slide was accidentally deployed at the gate, meaning the plane had to come out of service. The slide deployment was unrelated to the original issue that caused the diversion.
“The safety of our customers and crew is our number one priority at Delta. We apologize to our customers on flight 520 on Saturday for the experience they had. Delta teams are fully investigating,” Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson, said in an email statement.
According to the airline, the flight crew never declared an emergency related to the instruments. One crew member was taken to the hospital for evaluation as a result of the slide incident, but Delta said they were released soon after.
There were 168 passengers onboard the affected flight, and they were flown to their final destination by a different aircraft and landed later the same day.
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This is not a commentary on Delta, but the airline does seem to be a magnet for weird incidents lately.
A swarm of bees nested on a Delta plane scheduled to fly from Houston to Atlanta last month, delaying the flight for a few hours and becoming one of the main stories on Twitter for the day.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com
