Passengers flying back to London from the idyllic holiday destination of The Bahamas in the tropical West Atlantic were in for quite the adventure after their British Airways flight ended up diverting twice… first, due to an emergency medical situation and then because the crew ran out of hours.
The incident unfolded on Tuesday night after passengers boarded the British Airways Boeing 777-200, which was meant to whisk them overnight on an eight-hour flight from Nassau to London Heathrow.
After departing pretty much on time at around 10:20 pm on April 8, the 28-year-old plane started flying north for its transatlantic crossing, but around four hours into the flight, the pilots suddenly made a sharp westward bound turn towards Canada.
According to the airline, a passenger onboard flight BA252 had been taken sick and the decision was taken to divert the plane to Gander International Airport in Newfoundland so that the poorly customer could be rushed to a local hospital.
Once on the ground in Canada, however, the crew realized that they wouldn’t have enough legal hours to fly all the way back to London.
The reason is that pilots and cabin crew in the UK and across the European Union are governed by strict work rules known as ‘Flight Time Limitations.’ In optimal conditions, aircrew can work for up to 13 hours, but late-night departures reduce the available working time to as little as 10 hours.
This includes time before the flight to get to the airport and board passengers, so a flight like Nassau to London Heathrow would already not have a lot of wiggle room in the case of an unplanned delay or diversion.
In the case of ultra-long-haul flights, however, aircrew can extend their working hours by getting a set amount of time in dedicated crew rest facilities. Unfortunately, the Boeing 777-200 operating Flight 252 did not have these secret bunk compartments installed.
British Airways, however, came up with a novel solution to prevent up to 235 passengers from being stranded in Gander.
After the sick passenger was taken away by medics, the plane departed Gander but not with the intention of flying all the way to London. Instead, the pilots headed towards Keflavík International Airport in Iceland, which was reachable within the crew’s flight time limitations.
The plane landed at Keflavík Airport in the early hours of Wednesday morning, although British Airways didn’t intend to leave the passengers stranded in Iceland until the crew had a legally required amount of rest in a local hotel.
Instead, the airline sent an Airbus A321 on a rescue mission to Iceland with a new working crew who will fly the passengers on the Boeing 777 that has been on the ground since Wednesday morning.
The rescue aircraft departed London Heathrow at around 4 pm on Wednesday and is scheduled to arrive in Keflavík at around 5:30 pm (local time). If all goes according to plan, the Boeing 777 will depart for London a couple of hours later and arrive at Heathrow Airport late on Wednesday night.
Medical diversions such as this can cause some pretty big headaches for airlines, although, in this case, British Airways seems to be doing a good job at repatriating the stranded passengers as quickly as possible.
Last week, passengers onboard a Virgin Atlantic flight from London to Mumbai didn’t have such a fortunate resolution when their plane diverted to a remote airport in eastern Turkey due to a medical emergency.
In that incident, the Airbus A350 suffered a hard landing and had to be checked over by engineers before it could cleared to fly again. Unfortunately, there were no engineers qualified to do this work at Diyarbakır Airport, where the plane landed, so Virgin Atlantic had to arrange for its own technical staff to be flown to Turkey.
That process took some time, so the passengers ended up spending two nights in Diyarbakır. The first night was spent sleeping on the floor and benches of the cramped airport terminal, while Virgin Atlantic managed to convince local officials to give special immigration clearance for the passengers to spend the second night in local hotels.
When the engineers finally arrived in Diyarbakır, the plane was cleared to fly, and nearly two days after the aircraft had diverted, it was back on its way to Mumbai.
