Passengers on an Emirates flight from Dubai to Shanghai were in for quite the ride last week after they ended up trapped on one of the airline’s Airbus A380 superjumbos for up to 24 hours, on a flight that should have only taken eight hours.
Things got off to a bad start before the flight had even departed on July 22nd, when the passengers discovered that departure had been delayed by nearly five hours due to bad weather in Shanghai.
Emirates flight EK-302 was scheduled to depart Dubai International Airport (DXB) at 2:50 am and arrive at Shanghai Pudong the same day at 3:30 pm local time. In the end, however, the nearly 15 year old doubledeck A380 didn’t end up taking off until 7:40 am.
Even then, however, the plane wasn’t heading straight to Shanghai but rather to Hangzhou, which is around 177 km from Shanghai. The idea was that the plane would land in Hangzhou, wait out the storm, and then continue on to Shanghai.
Unfortunately, that’s not how this carefully choreographed plan worked out. Upon landing, it took longer for the weather to improve in Shanghai than Emirates’ weather forecasters had anticipated, and as the delay stretched on, the cabin crew who worked the flight from Dubai ran out of legal hours to continue the service to Shanghai.
For whatever reason, passengers weren’t allowed to deplane the A380 and had to be kept on board at the request of local authorities, while Emirates then devised a plan to transport an entire Superjumbo’s worth of pilots and cabin crew from Shanghai to Hangzhou to operate the remainder of the flight.
As passengers sat on the plane, they noticed that the flight status indicator on the Emirates website kept changing, with the new departure time first changing to midnight, then 3 am, and then 4:30 am.
When the new crew eventually arrived, the plane was about to depart, but the pilots discovered a technical issue with the plane. Only at this point did Emirates abandon its plan to fly the passengers the rest of the way to Shanghai, while local authorities relented and allowed the passengers to be deplaned in Hangzhou.
In the end, the last passengers deplaned at around 9 am on July 23 – nearly a full 24 hours after the plane departed Dubai.
Emirates says passengers were provided meals once inside the terminal and were then given the option of taking a two and a half hour bus ride straight to Shanghai, or first spend some time in a hotel at the airline’s expense.
Onboard, most passengers remained remarkably calm and stoic, but as the delay wore on, passengers reported at least two of their number fainting as the heat inside the cabin became increasingly hot and stuffy.
As for the broken Airbus A380. It stayed in Hangzhou for another day before it was ferried back to Dubai without any passengers on board. The aircraft reentered commercial service on July 25 without any other issues reported.
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