Passengers on a United Airlines flight from Sydney to San Francisco suffered a double diversion on Monday as their Boeing 777 first made an unscheduled stop in Samoa and then ended up in Honolulu before eventually arriving in San Francisco more than 15 hours later than planned.
United Airlines flight UA870 departed Sydney at around 11:35 am on May 11 for what should have been a time-traveling journey, crossing the international date line and arriving in San Francisco hours before it departed despite a 13-hour flight time.
Unfortunately for the passengers on this particular flight, a medical emergency at 35,000 feet meant that the pilots made an unscheduled diversion to Apia, the capital of Samoa, in the middle of the Pacific so that a sick customer could be rushed to a local hospital.
The diversion posed an immediate issue – with such a long flight time, the diversion meant that the pilots and flight attendants wouldn’t have enough legal hours to work all the way back to San Francisco – often known as ‘timing out.’
United had limited options to avoid stranding the passengers in Samoa, given that the airline doesn’t fly to Apia and the only regularly scheduled flights from the airport go to Nadi, Brisbane, or Auckland.
Instead, United worked out that the pilots and flight attendants still had enough legal hours to fly around six hours to Honolulu, where the airline could arrange a replacement crew to get the passengers the rest of the way to San Francisco.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the flight departed Apia and flew to Honolulu, where fresh aircrew were waiting to take over. In the end, the passengers arrived in San Francisco at 10:30 pm on Tuesday.
This is an increasingly common tactic to get passengers to their destination when an unscheduled diversion messes with legal flying hours.
Last month, a British Airways flight from the Bahamas to London made a double diversion, first due to an emergency medical incident and then because the pilots and flight attendants were about to time out (aviation rules known as Flight Time Regulations set strict limits on how many hours aircrew can work).
In this case, the first diversion was to Gander, Canada, and then Keflavík Airport in Iceland, where British Airways sent an otherwise empty Airbus A321 with new pilots and flight attendants to get the passengers on the diverted flight back to London.
Airlines will often do everything possible to avoid a costly diversion due to medical incidents, and many international carriers spend millions of dollars per year on subscriptions with ground-based medical services so that flight attendants can communicate with a doctor via satellite phone.
The doctor is able to provide advice and support to the crew to give passengers the best medical care in the air while also advising the pilots whether they believe a diversion is necessary or not.
Ultimately, however, the Captain is responsible for deciding whether a diversion is required.
