A British Airways (BA) commercial aircraft flew hundreds of passengers for 11-hours but took them nowhere on 29 June, ending up back at its original point of departure due to a technical fault.
Boeing problems?
The Boeing 777-200 took off from London Heathrow Airport at 8:55 pm on Saturday, 29 June. It was heading for Hong Kong, but according to FlightRadar24 data, more than four hours into the service, as flight BA31 went through Turkmenistan’s airspace at 10,000 metres altitude, a “technical issue” was discovered, and a decision was made to turn the plane around.
The crew returned the plane to BA’s home Heathrow, where the airline has a maintenance hub. Some outlets are reporting that the 23-year-old Boeing which had an engine change last year, is the same craft (registered G-YMMI) that U-turned back to Doha in November for a full-scale emergency landing after smoke was detected.
Other so-called “flights to nowhere” reported recently include another BA service from London to Houston in June, and a November Air New Zealand Auckland to Chicago route, which were both operated aboard Boeing Dreamliners that also developed technical faults that the crew acted upon around four hours into their journey.
Aviation giant Boeing is beset with legal and reputational problems amid a quality and safety crisis that has grounded planes and, in the first quarter of the year, seen its value plummet, with May orders well behind rival Airbus, and a backlog that is creating knock-on problems for airlines.
A precaution
The nature of the fault with the Boeing operating flight BA31 has not been revealed at the time of writing. Although it was serious enough to force the aircraft to make a U-turn, British Airways appeared to minimise the problem in a statement describing the mid-air turnaround as “a precaution due to a minor technical issue.”
Emphasising that the craft “landed safely” the airline said, “customers disembarked as normal. We’ve apologised to our customers for the disruption to their journey.”
On their re-arrival at Heathrow, 11 hours after departure, passengers were greeted with the news that the next flight to Hong Kong the following day had been cancelled. In a further gut punch for them, an attempt to fly the route later on Sunday with a new 777 was again diverted. This time the re-routing took them to Budapest only three hours into the flight, due not to a technical failure but to a medical emergency.
