What should have been an eleven-hour transpacific flight from San Francisco to Tokyo was cut short very quickly on Monday after water started pouring through the ceiling of the cabin on the United Airlines Boeing 777-200 just 20 minutes after takeoff.
Passengers on United flight UA875 had already been delayed by an hour on March 31, but as the 27-year-old plane was still climbing to its cruising altitude for the long-haul flight to Japan, a water leak became very evident at the very back of the plane.
Water Leak Today
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One of the passengers onboard the aircraft captured the moment that water poured from the ceiling, creating a rain-like effect in the aft galley of the Economy cabin, posting a short video clip to the popular social media platform Reddit.
Despite the fact that the passengers knew by this point that the plane would be diverting straight back to San Francisco, a passenger sitting mere inches from the gushing water looks remarkably unbothered by what is going on around them.
The cause of the water leak has not been revealed by United Airlines, although the main clean water pipe on the Boeing 777-200 model runs through the cabin ceiling from front to back.
In fact, the Boeing 777 even has water shut-off valves built into several parts of the cabin ceiling in case of an eventuality such as this.
In any case, a serious water leak such as this would not only quickly deplete the clean water tank, especially on a long-haul flight, but the amount of water involved could damage some of the sensitive wiring underneath the passenger cabin.
As a result, a quick return to San Francisco would be the most sensible solution, rather than trying to isolate the water and continue toward Tokyo.
As one person commented on the original video posted on Reddit, at least the leak didn’t involve a waste water pipe from one of the onboard lavatories. A scenario that occurred nearly a year to the day on a United Airlines Boeing 777-300, which was flying from Frankfurt to San Francisco.
In that incident, sewage started to flood out of several lavatories onboard the plane as it was making its initial ascent out of Frankfurt, with the vile-smelling wastewater leaking down the aisle of the cabin.
After entering a short holding pattern in an attempt to troubleshoot the issue, the pilots decided it wasn’t safe to continue a transatlantic flight with sewage overflowing from several toilets, so they decided to divert the aircraft back to Frankfurt, where the plane was temporarily taken out of service.
As for the latest incident, United has also got maintenance crews working on the water leak, and according to flight tracking website Flight Radar 24, the aircraft should be ready to go back into service on Wednesday on a regularly scheduled flight from San Francisco to London Heathrow.
United eventually found a replacement aircraft for the passengers on Flight 875, which took off from San Francisco more than seven hours after its scheduled departure.
