A long-time friend asked me this question recently. He's no ordinary traveler. He's a very frequent flier and was, until a few years ago, in a high position at a major aviation regulatory agency in the United States. (Yes, that's FAA.) While he knows a lot about aviation, GSE maintenance is not his strong suit. So he turned to me.
Seems he was flying through JFK one rainy day last week and had to take a bus on the AOA from one terminal to another. It was raining pretty hard outside, but also inside the bus. Not an occasional drop or even a steady leak in one spot – but water was pooling at the emergency escape hatches in the bus' roof and spewing randomly on the hapless passengers. Not just one escape hatch, but apparently both hatches had the same problem. Because the bus was crowded and the water was not spewing in any consistent direction because of the movement of the bus, some passengers got pretty splashed on.
So his question really was, how hard would it have been to fix the leak? (And, yes, the bus driver was fully aware of it; he even sort of apologized to the passengers.) It's hard to say, of course, how hard it would have been to fix, but it might have been a simple thing to clean the seal and reseal it. Or it might have had to have been replaced. But whatever it took, it wasn't a major cost. And obviously not a high-priority safety issue. But still.
The troubling thing to me is, what does it say about an equipment provider, its employees or the airline for which it flies when soaking passengers (literally) isn't all that much of a concern?
