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Airline Turns Plane Around Over The Atlantic After Realizing It Was Scheduled Maintenance That Couldn’t Wait

Airline Turns Plane Around Over The Atlantic After Realizing It Was Scheduled Maintenance That Couldn’t Wait

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Airbus A330 taking off from Amsterdam Schiphol

Passengers on an international flight from Amsterdam to Toronto had a frustrating experience on Monday after the airline discovered that the plane they were on had to go into the hangar for scheduled… the only problem was that by this point, the plane was already flying over the Atlantic Ocean.

Thankfully, the scheduled maintenance didn’t have anything to do with the airworthiness of the 13-year-old aircraft, but passengers were still told that there was no other option but to turn the plane and send it straight back to Amsterdam.

Flight details:

  • Airline: KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
  • Flight number and route: KL691 (AMS – YYZ)
  • Aircraft: Airbus A330-300
  • Registration: PH-AKA
  • Engines: General Electric CF6-80
  • First flight: Delivered new to KLM on February 29, 2012

The incident involved KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight KL-691, which was meant to depart Amsterdam at 11:20 am for the nine-hour flight to Toronto on June 16.

Bizarrely, passengers had already been forced to endure a nearly two-hour departure flight after the first plane assigned for the flight had to be taken out of service due to a maintenance issue.

The Dutch flag carrier managed to find a replacement aircraft, but seemingly unbeknownst to anyone involved, the plane had actually been scheduled for maintenance on Monday.

KL691- Mid-flight return to Amsterdam🙃
byu/East-Alternative-819 inKLM

It wasn’t until around two hours into the flight, as the plane was flying at 35,000 feet, that someone at KLM realized their mistake and instructed the pilots to return to Amsterdam because the plane had to be taken out of service.

“Literally mid-flight, we got the announcement that the plane they got was not supposed to fly and needed big maintenance that was due today,” one passenger on the plane explained in a post on Reddit.

As you can imagine, the pilots and cabin crew were “very apologetic” about the situation, although it did leave the passenger wondering if this was a major flaw in KLM’s systems and why this could be allowed to happen.

What was the maintenance issue, and why couldn’t it be done in Toronto?

It’s important to note that the aircraft was safe to fly and that the defect wasn’t something that affected the airworthiness of the plane, as any sort of issue like that would need to be immediately fixed before the aircraft was allowed to depart.

As you can imagine, however, various non-urgent defects are discovered on something as big and complex as a widebody airliner every day. Many of these are truly minor issues, like a broken lavatory, a faulty reading light, or a non-safety-related problem in the cockpit.

Aircraft have a ‘minimum equipment list’ or MEL, which clearly lists what must be present and functioning for a plane to be considered airworthy and allowed to depart.

Other fixes can be put off until a later date, and these are known as ‘acceptable deferred defects’ or ADDs.

ADDs do, however, come with a time limit before they have to be fixed. If that time limit elapses, then the plane has to be taken out of service until the ADD is fixed – even something minor like a faulty reading light.

In this situation, the ADD was probably going to elapse when the plane was in Toronto, but it likely required the expertise and resources of KLM’s engineers at its home base. Therefore, there was no other option but to divert the plane back to Amsterdam.

Matt’s take

In my experience as a flight attendant, airlines will often push an ADD fix back as far as possible, especially when you consider that the supply of spare parts is still a significant issue throughout the aviation industry.

Things are slowly getting better, but I’ve been in a situation where a flight has been significantly delayed because an ADD with an elapsed time limit has been discovered just before departure.

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