Last Updated on: 13th June 2024, 05:35 pm
Passengers travel from London to London on 9-hour ‘flight to nowhere’
Pilots on a British Airways flight from Heathrow to Texas discovered a minor technical issue while over Canada and decided to return to the UK rather than divert to a local airport
I was not on this plane, but I can feel my blood boiling just reading that it happened.
I don’t like travelling when everything goes right. Carin will tell you this, likely between bouts of cursing that I saw the damn story and lamenting that now it’s going to be even harder to get me on another bus/train/plane/boat/donkey/whatever it is that takes people on long, shitty trips. And this, obviously, did not go right, even though it quite clearly could have.
If you know you can fly all the way home, a voyage that takes about as long as finishing the trip these poor saps paid to endure, just keep flying, for god’s sake. Your on the ground resource problems are yours, not theirs. I’m sure you could have borrowed some workers from another airline or something. Just maybe double check their work if they’re from United.
Jesus Christ. I feel like somebody needs to restrain me in this office chair like I’m one of those drunk ass plane Karens in all the videos before I completely flip my lid.
The flight had departed from Heathrow just before 10am on Monday morning and landed back where it started at shortly before 7pm. In total, the “flight to nowhere” travelled 7,779km (4,834 miles), according to FlightRadar24, the tracking website.
Typically, flights from London to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston complete the whole journey in about ten hours and 15 minutes.
It is understood that one of the plane’s Rolls-Royce Trent engines flagged a warning message as the plane was approaching Canada. However, while it did not pose an immediate safety risk, it would need inspection and engineering work.Instead of continuing to Houston or diverting to another airport in North America — where BA would have limited, or no, engineering resources — the pilots appear to have made the decision to return to London, the airline’s home.
Oh yes, your hatred of traveling is legendary, so legendary that I had a dream about it. I had a dream you finally got your passport, and we were going to fly somewhere, and there was some problem with your passport. You were quietly getting madder and madder, and muttered “Just fix it!” I woke up and had to ask myself if this really happened, and then I actually had to remember that this had to have been a dream because you don’t have an active passport. You hate the actual act of traveling. I have become more anxious about people losing my stuff or forgetting me or treating me like an inanimate object.
That’s one of those dreams that I could absolutely imagine happening in real life. If I’m going to lose my mind, I quite often do it quietly.
And I don’t blame you for getting nervous about being forgotten. It’s happened to you what, twice? And those were before the pandemic when people still kind of knew how words worked.