A second plane in just a week made an interesting double diversion so that the crew could be swapped out with fresh pilots and flight attendants to avoid stranding passengers in a foreign country.
The clever tactic occurred on April 13 when passengers boarded a Eurowings flight from the popular Egyptian holiday destination of Hurghada for what should have been a routine five-hour flight to Cologne.
Although the flight departure was delayed by nearly two hours due to the late arrival of the inbound plane, what the passengers probably didn’t expect when they boarded flight EW981 last Sunday was that they would end up landing three times before eventually arriving home.
As reported by Aero Telegraph, soon after departing Hurghada and climbing to a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, one of the passengers onboard the Boeing 737 was taken sick, and a medical emergency was declared.
By this point, the plane was flying over the Mediterranean Sea towards Europe, and there were few places for the plane to land so that the sick passenger could get urgent medical care.
Around one and a half hours after takeoff, the plane landed at Heraklion Airport on the Greek island of Crete, where the passenger was taken to hospital, and the plane was refueled for the rest of its journey back to Germany.
The whole process, however, took some time, and the plane didn’t end up departing Crete for another two hours. By the time the plane was back in the air, it was clear that the pilots and cabin crew were fast running out of legal hours to operate the flight and couldn’t make it all the way back to Cologne.
For context, the crew would have started their working day in Cologne to work the outbound flight, which was scheduled to depart at 07:10 am. European rules known as ‘Flight Time Limitations’ limit the number of hours that pilots and flight attendants can work to a maximum of 13 hours – although this can be extended to 15 hours in the event of an unforeseen delay.
By the time the flight was ready to depart Crete, the crew and the airline would already have known that they couldn’t legally get the plane all the way back to Germany.
But rather than stranding the passengers overnight on a Greek island, the airline came up with a clever plan to get the plane closer to Germany, where a replacement crew would be waiting to take over the plane to complete the rest of the flight.
In this case, the plane, which was operated by wetlease partner Smartwings, flew to Zagreb in Croatia where a new crew was being sent to take over.
For the passengers, that meant another two-hour wait on the ground before the plane eventually took off for the third time to fly the rest of the way to Cologne. In the end, the plane arrived at its intended destination more than six hours after its scheduled time.
On April 8, Britsh Airways used the same tactic to repatriate a planeload of passengers traveling from The Bahamas to London Heathrow after the Boeing 777 had to make an emergency medical diversion to Gander in Canada.
In this incident, the airline was aware that the crew couldn’t legally operate the rest of the flight from Gander to London due to Flight Time Limitations, but British Airways didn’t want to strand the plane and passengers in Newfoundland.
Instead, the plane flew from Gander to Kefalik in Iceland, while British Airways despatched a replacement crew on an otherwise empty aircraft from its Heathrow hub to meet the passengers in Iceland.
A lot of Boeing 777 aircraft are fitted with crew bunks which could have considerably extended the Flight Time Limitations of the pilots and flight attendants. This particular was not, however, outfitted with crew rest facilities.
