Passengers Take 16-Hour Flight to Nowhere After Auckland to New York U-Turn

(Bloomberg) -- Passengers boarding a trans-Pacific flight from Auckland to New York on Thursday evening had no idea of the rude awakening that awaited them: a 16-hour ordeal that saw them back at square one.

Air New Zealand Ltd. Flight NZ2 should have touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport Terminal 1 at 5:40 p.m. local time, but a power outage threw operations into disarray, affecting at least 135 flights into and out of the city.

Data from Flightradar24’s website showed the Boeing 787 jet making a U-turn about halfway into its nearly 9,000-mile (14,000 kilometer) journey over the Pacific Ocean, just south of Hawaii. The turnaround made the jet the top-tracked flight on the site, which monitors aircraft all over the world in real time.

“Due to an electrical fire in Terminal 1 at JFK Airport and the terminal’s subsequent closure, NZ2 Auckland to New York was forced to divert back to Auckland,” Air New Zealand said in a statement.

“Diverting to another US port would have meant the aircraft would remain on the ground for several days, impacting a number of other scheduled services and customers.” The carrier said the company was working to rebook passengers on the next available flights.

The turnaround echoed a similar incident in January, when an Emirates flight from Dubai to Auckland turned back due to flooding at its destination, treating passengers to a 13-hour flight to nowhere. The closure of Auckland airport, New Zealand’s biggest, sparked a major operation by Air New Zealand to bring back over 9,000 customers trapped overseas.

Still, the passengers from Auckland were not the only ones to experience a travel nightmare. A Korean Air Lines Co. flight bound for New York from Seoul’s Incheon International Airport, KE85, was just off the coast of Alaska before having to turn back due to the JFK outage.

“The airline recognized that a diversion was inevitable about 5 hours and 30 minutes into the 14-hour flight,” said a spokesperson for the airline. “All options have been considered, and a decision was made to return to Incheon in light of multiple factors such as distance traveled and operational circumstances.”

That would have been little comfort for the passengers, who landed back where they started in South Korea at 10:14 a.m. local time Friday, after a nearly 14-hour journey.

--With assistance from Angus Whitley and Danny Lee.

(Adds last three paragraphs on Korean Air diversion)

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Author: Low De Wei