A United Airlines flight from Newark to London was forced to make an emergency diversion just an hour and a half into its transatlantic crossing late on Saturday night after a passenger sitting in the Polaris Business Class cabin allegedly made a threat to the ‘security of the aircraft.’
The Boeing 767, with as many as 167 passengers onboard, departed Newark Liberty Airport at around 10:35 p.m. on November 7, but the pilots were forced to make an abrupt u-turn just after flying past Nova Scotia and returned straight to New York.
One of the passengers onboard recounted what happened next on the popular social media site Reddit, explaining that a flight attendant told him that the flight had to make an emergency return to New York because someone had threatened the security of the airplane.
Once back on the ground in Newark, law enforcement was waiting to meet the plane and take the suspect into custody. This wasn’t, however, the end of the drama for the rest of the passengers onboard.
By this point, the pilots and flight attendants were close to ‘timing out,’ meaning that they would exceed the maximum duty hours legally permitted if they continued to work the flight to London.
As a result, United had to scramble to assemble a replacement group of flight attendants who had been sitting around the airport on reserve. Many of these crew members were relatively junior and couldn’t believe they were going to be able to have a layover in London – a destination normally reserved for veteran flight attendants.
Unfortunately, finding a replacement crew wasn’t the only issue that United had to deal with as Newark started to wind down for the night. The passengers also had to wait for the airline to find a fuel truck to refuel the plane, and then it had to be re-catered because all the food had spoiled.
In the end, the passenger says that a short six-and-a-half overnight flight to Europe turned into an agonizing 15-16-hour stint sitting on the same airplane.
By the time the flight departed again from Newark, it was already morning, although that didn’t mean any changes to the planned catering had been made. Instead, passengers were served steak or chicken for breakfast and then ended up with eggs or French toast for dinner.
Some commentators questioned why the flight didn’t divert to a closer airport in Canada after the suspect made their threats, but others pointed out that if the pilots had chosen that option, everyone would likely have been stranded in an isolated airport overnight while United arranged a rescue flight to pick them up.
“…a flight attendant told him that the flight had to make an emergency return to New York because someone had threatened the security of the airplane.”
This, like much of what gets posted to this site, as either news or commentary, is gossipy.