Passengers on a British Airways flight from London Gatwick to Costa Rica endured a nine-hour flight to nowhere on Monday after their 24-year-old Boeing 777 turned around halfway across the Atlantic and took them straight back to London.
British Airways flight BA2237 departed London Gatwick at around 11:40 am on October 29 for what should have been a routine 11-hour flight to the popular winter sun destination of San Jose.
After departing around 30 minutes later than scheduled, the Boeing 777-200, with as many as 332 passengers onboard, got as far as midway across the Atlantic when it suddenly made a 180-degree turn and headed back towards London.
The passengers had already been in the air for nearly six hours by the time the plane turned around and ended up arriving right back, where they started around nine hours after first setting off.
A relatively minor technical hitch was the cause of the frustrating diversion, with some sources saying the problem had to do with a water leak coming from the onboard potable water supply.
British Airways passengers have had to endure a slew of these ‘flights to nowhere’ in recent months, including an incident in July when passengers hoping to fly from London Heathrow to Hong Kong were forced to sit through an 11-hour flight to nowhere after the pilots turned back as the plane was flying over Turkmenistan.
In that incident, the passengers ended up being onboard for just one hour less than the time it would have taken to fly to Hong Kong.
And in June, a British Airways flight to Houston turned back to London just as it reached the coast of North America because of what the airline described as a ‘minor technical issue’ with the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
The flight time for this flight to nowhere was nine hours, which is just 30-40 minutes less than the time it normally takes to fly between London and Houston.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like these flights to nowhere are going to be a one-off, as British Airways appears to prioritize getting its aircraft back to its home bases in London Heathrow and Gatwick should a technical issue arise mid-flight.
Doing so allows British Airways to use its own engineers to fix problems in its own maintenance hangars, rather than potentially having an aircraft stranded at an overseas airport where it would have to rely on third-party engineers to fix any maintenance issues.
On the flip side, that means, of course, that passengers end up getting to their destination a lot later than planned after sitting through lengthy flights to nowhere.
