Passengers spend 16-hour in flight, but reaches nowhere as plane takes U-turn halfway over Pacific

Passengers of an Air New Zealand flight to New York experienced a rude shock when their trans-Pacific flight made a U-turn halfway, resulting a 16-hour nightmare that brought them back where they started.

Air New Zealand Flight NZ2 departed Auckland Thursday evening but diverted back to Auckland around eight hours into the flight due to a fire incident at the arrival destination at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JKF Airport). The Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner landed back in Auckland at around 1 PM on Friday, spending 16-hours in a flight to nowhere.

A power outage threw operations into disarray at the JFK Airport, affecting at least 135 flights. Data from Flightradar24’s website showed the Boeing 787 jet made a u-turn about halfway into its nearly 9,000-mile (14,000 kilometer) journey over the Pacific Ocean, just south of Hawaii. The turnaround made the jet the top-tracked flight on the site, which monitors aircraft all over the world in real time.



Air New Zealand said that they decided to call back the flight instead of diverting it to another US airport as this would have grounded the plane for several days.

“Due to an electrical fire in Terminal 1 at JFK Airport and the terminal’s subsequent closure, NZ2 Auckland to New York was forced to divert back to Auckland,” Air New Zealand said in a statement. “Diverting to another US port would have meant the aircraft would remain on the ground for several days, impacting a number of other scheduled services and customers.”

The airline also said that it is working to rebook passengers on the next available flights. In a similar incident in January, an Emirates flight from Dubai to Auckland was turned back to origin due to flooding at its destination, treating passengers to a 13-hour flight to nowhere. The closure of Auckland airport, New Zealand’s biggest, sparked a major operation by Air New Zealand to bring back over 9,000 customers trapped overseas.