(NEXSTAR) – Some Delta passengers booked on a Salt Lake City-bound flight were stranded overnight after their plane’s emergency slide was mistakenly deployed shortly before takeoff Saturday.
The incident happened while Flight 3248 was still at the gate at Pittsburgh International Airport, a Delta spokesperson confirmed to Nexstar.
“While the aircraft door was being opened, crew inadvertently deployed an emergency slide at the gate in PIT,” the spokesperson said in an email. “As a result, customers on the return flight from PIT to SLC were rebooked on other Delta flights to their destination later that evening or the following morning.”
Delta said it provided hotel accommodations for the passengers who weren’t able to fly until Sunday.
One Reddit user shared a photo, purportedly from inside the plane, that showed the slide, and wrote that the flight attendant “did apologize and was quite flustered.” The flight attendant reportedly said that it had never happened before during his 26-year career, according to the Redditor.
In order to get passengers to safety as quickly and easily as possible, the giant, inflatable slides are built to fully deploy in just seconds.
“In an emergency, you want ‘open door = slide goes’ with zero extra steps. Adding friction increases evacuation risk,” one expert told the New York Post. “That’s a design tradeoff that’s intentionally made to increase likelihood of quick exit in an emergency.”
Beyond the headache for passengers, repacking an inadvertently-deployed slide can be expensive for the airline.
Aviation website simpleflying.com reports that repacking the slide alone costs roughly $12,000, with the price ballooning to “as much as $200,000” when passengers need to stay the night in a hotel.
It isn’t the only time a flight attendant has mistakenly deployed the emergency slide, however.
A March, 2024 a flight attendant apologized after deploying the slide on the tarmac in Salem, Oregon. In that case, passengers had to deplane using the rear door, a spokesperson said.