You don't really think it would be necessary to turn off your plane then turn it back on again, but here we are.
I was on a turboprop flight about to depart the airport when we come to a stop and the pilot says that they have a problem with one of the bits of avionics -- I think he said it was for navigation, and that a mechanic was being driven over to swap it out.
This isn't unexpected per se; my knowledge of avionics is that a lot of design goes into making things easy to change out. If you can just swap the chunk that's not working out the plane gets into the air much faster and the electronics can be examined at leisure.
So we're sitting there about fifteen minutes, and the pilot comes on and says "Well, the mechanic says we should try powering down the plane and powering it back up before we exchange it."
They do so. It seems to take a good bit of time, probably five minutes. The pilot comes on and says "Well, that didn't work, but the mechanic wants us to try one more time."
Once again, everything on the plane shuts down, we sit there in the darkness, and then the plane starts back up.
The pilot comes on and says "We're all good now, so we're going to leave the airport."
I felt a bit nervous the whole flight.
Sad that this story's "thought experiment" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16393740 from 8 days ago may be the future, not a joke. Sorry you couldn't drive to work, we're pushing an update to your car by the middle of the week.
I've never been in more of a white-knuckle situation in my life, including the time a tire blew while landing at IAD. We then sat on tarmac for close to 3 more hours while they replaced the computers and we took off again in the same plane.