Bad Timing Means A Funny Story

This is more of a funny story than a complaint, but it still raises a couple of questions.

Flying out of Dunedin (not Queenstown, but Dunedin is not an option on here) to Auckland, we had taxied to the runway threshold which is quite a distance away from the terminal buildings, where we waited. 5 minutes, 10 minutes then 15 minutes later we were told there was a problem with one of the spoilers that the flight deck were unable to fix, so we would have to taxi back to the terminal.

Back at the terminal, we were asked to remain in our seats and the cabin crew opened the doors for the engineers to come on board. About 10 minutes later, the problem was fixed and we taxied back to the threshold and managed to take-off for Auckland without any further issues on the flight itself.

The delay had caused some passengers to miss their onward flights, particularly to Australia, despite only being a relatively small delay on arrival of 30-40 minutes. Jetstar offered no recompense for this to my knowledge.

The reason this caused me to laugh? On the ground in Dunedin, the engineers had told the captain how to fix the problem he had - using the engineers' fix-it-al: turn the plane computers off, then back on again.

Still, I do wonder why they didn't just do their checks at the terminal, where something could have been done about it straight away and thus causing minimal delays - especially at a small regional airport where there was no need to hurry out of the bay.

Domestic
New Zealand-Queenstown
New Zealand-Auckland