If you’re a frequent flyer, you’ve seemingly had a airplane rerouted in flight. Sometimes there’s dangerous climate at your vacation spot airport, typically a mechanical subject forces you to make a pit cease — it’s regular sufficient on this planet of air journey. But discovering your vacation spot airport is closing, when you’re solely minutes away, is actually rarer.
That’s the destiny that befell passengers of Japan Airlines flight JL331 this previous weekend. A two-hour flight out of Haneda Airport in Tokyo noticed 90 minutes of delays, which pushed its scheduled touchdown in Fukoka dangerously near the airport’s 10 p.m. curfew. As the airplane neared Fukoka, the pilots found it could barely miss the cutoff — and had been pressured to show round.
Bloomberg tells the complete story of JL331’s determined makes an attempt to simply land someplace, wherever. It was initially purported to be redirected from Fukoka to Kitakyushu, simply an hour’s drive away, however the latter airport didn’t have sufficient buses for the airplane’s 335 passengers.
Instead, the airplane was directed to Kansai airport, practically midway again to Tokyo. The airplane landed simply earlier than 11 p.m., solely to study that Kansai, too, lacked the infrastructure to deal with JL331’s passengers. So, passengers returned to cruising altitude, sure again for Tokyo — arriving again the place they began, seven hours later.
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Next time your airplane is delayed in Newark, or your JFK-bound flight is redirected to Philadelphia for climate, keep in mind the passengers of JL331. Just be glad that, irrespective of how lengthy your airplane spends between locations, you’ll nearly actually attain your eventual arrival airport finally. And, in the event you by no means do, keep in mind you’re not alone — it’s all occurred earlier than.
Source: jalopnik.com