Sometimes you’ll see flight delays because passengers have to be removed from the aircraft, though it’s not every day that you see a delay because crew members had to be removed.
United flight attendant disagreement leads to delay
PYOK has the story of what happened on Monday, October 27, 2025, on United Airlines flight UA2138 from Des Moines (DSM) to Chicago (ORD). The short 299-mile flight was operated by an Airbus A320, and was scheduled to depart Des Moines at 11:26AM, and arrive in Chicago at 12:57PM. However, that’s not how things played out.
While we don’t have the dramatized version of events, we do have the facts, which is what United’s internal system showed as the cause of the delay:
Crew Availability Flight Attendant : Disagreement on 2 of the FAs . IFDM pulling all crew and will need to recrew flight.
For what it’s worth, “IFDM” stands for inflight duty manager, so those are the managers who oversee flight attendants. All passengers ended up being deplaned at 12:08PM, around 40 minutes after the scheduled departure time. So it sounds like the disagreement may have dragged on a bit, given that the decision to find a new crew was only made so long after the incident first started.
A new crew was then found, and the flight finally departed at 3:24PM, just under four hours behind schedule, and arrived at 5:09PM, a little over four hours behind schedule.
Ordinarily, United’s flight status page provides detailed explanations sharing the reasons for delays, though that’s not available here… perhaps unsurprisingly.
These kinds of incidents are very rare, but do happen
As you’d expect, flight attendants work with all kinds of different people, so they’re used to having to get along with others. After all, they rarely work with the same person twice, and the industry attracts all kinds of characters.
As a result, it’s extremely rare to see a disagreement between crew members get so bad that they have to delay a flight and find a completely new crew. One certainly wonders what kind of a disagreement caused this incident.
In these kinds of situations, often it comes down to different approaches to customer service between flight attendants. Maybe one flight attendant is treating a passenger poorly, and the other flight attendant refuses to go along with that (since flight attendants often have one another’s backs, even when they maybe shouldn’t).
This isn’t even limited to flight attendants, as you’ll also see this with pilots sometimes. A July 2022 incident comes to mind, where two Alaska pilots on a flight from Washington (IAD) to San Francisco (SFO) couldn’t get along. One of the pilots even explained the situation to passengers, stating the delay was “due to a failure to get along,” and that he was leaving the plane “in the interest of safety.”
So yeah, ideally everyone would be able to get along, and incidents like this shouldn’t happen. At the same time, if there truly is a situation where two people just can’t work together, I appreciate when that’s addressed before takeoff, so it doesn’t pose a safety risk inflight.
Bottom line
A United Airlines flight from Des Moines to Chicago was delayed by hours, after two flight attendants reportedly couldn’t get along, to the point that their supervisor had to get involved, and a new crew had to be found. As a result, the flight was delayed by around four hours.
While people often get removed from aircraft before departure, it’s typically a passenger and not a crew member, so this is a pretty rare one.
What do you make of this United incident?
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