British Airways Flight to Hong Kong Forced to Return to London Because There Was No Running Water Onboard

A British Airways flight from London to Hong Kong was forced to return to Heathrow Airport just an hour and a half after departure on Friday night after the onboard water system reportedly stopped working.

Passengers onboard the plane say the flight had already been delayed by over an hour as engineers worked to fix a technical issue with the 15-year-old Boeing 777-200 aircraft on the ground, but their hopes of getting to Hong Kong were dashed as the plane was flying at 33,000 feet over Bratislava.

At that point, the Captain made the dreaded announcement that a technical issue had cropped up and that it would require them to return to London for it to be fixed. Passengers claim they were told that the issue involved the water system and that there was no running water onboard.

Given the fact that there should have been plenty of bottled water onboard, this might seem like a relatively minor issue which would allow the plane and its passengers to continue onto Hong Kong where the problem could then be fixed.

Although British Airways has described the issue as a ‘minor technical fault’, a decision was nevertheless made to return to Heathrow, where the flight was eventually cancelled, and the passengers were made to stay another night in London.

This has become an increasingly common tactic to deal with inflight technical issues at British Airways, where operations managers would sooner get a faulty aircraft back to Heathrow where it can be fixed in the airline’s own hangars, even if that means so pretty lengthy delays for passengers.

In some respects, the passengers on flight BA31 on July 26 should at least be grateful that the technical fault was discovered just an hour and a half into the 13 hours flight.

Last month, passengers on the same flight from Heathrow to Hong Kong were subjected to an 11-hour flight to nowhere after a technical issue arose as the plane was flying over Turkmenistan.

Despite being at the halfway mark of their journey to Hong Kong, the pilots were instructed to turn around and return to London so that BA’s own engineers could fix the issue rather than risk having the plane grounded in a foreign country.

Just a few weeks before that incident, passengers on a flight from Heathrow to Houston endured a nine-hour flight to nowhere just as their Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner had reached North America following a transatlantic crossing.

At this point, the pilots realised there was a technical issue with the plane, so they turned around and flew right back across the Atlantic to get the plane back to Heathrow.

The passengers flew for pretty much the same length of time as it would have taken them to get to Houston but ended up exactly where they started.

Although the United Kingdom has left the European Union, the government decided to adopt very similar air travel compensation rules as have been place in Europe for years.

This makes airlines liable for paying compensation if your flight is significantly delayed or cancelled unless they can prove that the issue was outside of their control.

The rules differ slightly from Europe’s famous EC261 regulations but for long-haul flights over 3,500km, passengers are entitled to compensation of up to £520 if you are delayed by four hours or more or up to £260 if an airline is able to reroute you to your final destination which incurs a delay of under four hours.

British law applies to a compensation claim if you are departing the UK on any airline or if you are arriving in the UK on a British or European carrier. The British rules also apply if you are arriving into Europe or a British carrier.

In a statement, a spokesperson for British Airways said the flight had to return to London due to a “minor technical issue”.

The statement added: “We apologised to our customers for the disruption to their journey.”