"Terrified" Delta passengers land safely in Athens
Delta is "famous" for its aging fleet -- maybe wrinkle cream for planes?
A Delta flight from Atlanta to Athens (#148) with 248 passengers on board landed safely at Athens International Airport Sunday morning following an indication of overheating in the braking system which according to an airline spokesperson was in fact a false alarm.
That doesn’t mean passengers weren’t alarmed, however. According to NeaKriti, our favorite regional Greek newspaper, “moments of agony prevailed” with one passenger saying "our life was cut short, we lost 10 years of our lives from what happened” and another reporting that “we shivered from top to bottom, we were terrified, we were shocked because this was very dangerous".
Dangerously or not, the Delta Airbus A330 safely made an emergency landing shortly before 11AM.
According to Delta’s website the aircraft in question is an A330-300, which is by no means a new airplane. The first ones entered service in the mid-90s, and a newer version was pushed out in 2010. It’s possible this plane is more than a decade old.
It’s widely known in the industry that Delta’s fleet is hardly the youngest, and the company probably has reasons for that—all of which have to do with that often inelegant practice called saving a little money.
All American airlines, not just Delta, have a rather nasty, if little discussed, habit of assigning aging aircraft to secondary or seasonal European routes—you’re more likely to find a new A350 working the JFK-Heathrow route (though in codeshare with Virgin Atlantic) than, say, from Gotham to Rome. This, as airlines executives continue to fatten their wallets to the tune of millions of unmerited dollars, regardless of this or that pandemic or other adverse economic circumstance.
Kudos to the Delta pilot and crew.