Six hours sitting on a plane and then going nowhere: the surreal story
Is there anything worse than sitting still on a plane for hours, waiting for it to refuel? Well yes: seeing [...]
United Airlines
Star Alliance
There is something worse than stand still on a plane for hours, waiting for me to refuel? Well yes: seeing that flight cancelled.
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It happened to the passengers of United Airlines who, after waiting six hours on board the aircraft, had to disembark (without having gone anywhere). The reason? The flight crew, The Independent reported, had run out of working hours.
What happened to the United Airlines flight
The flight, which was to depart from Newark and land in Denver, was initially delayed due to poor weather conditions.
After taxiing for more than six hours, he returned to the terminal because no longer had all the fuel needed to sustain the entire trip. This was the reason given by a spokesman for the airline.
Hiroko Tabuchi, a New York Times reporter, was on board the plane. And she commented on the story in a series of tweets in real time. She initially wrote that the plane had been taxiing around Newark Airport for some time. She later said it had been grounded in Newark for six hours. United responded to her tweet, apologizing for the long delay.
"We were literally stuck inside the plane," Tabuchi tweeted.
Then the plane returned to the gate so that passengers could disembark while it was being refueled.
Finally, travelers received a notification on the United app: while the ground crew was telling them to get on the plane, when they had finished refueling, the company notified them that the flight was cancelled. So the plane was grounded for another two hours, in what-at that point-was definitely a surreal situation. After well nine hours from scheduled takeoff (and never happened), the carrier permanently canceled the flight because the staff was no longer authorized to work.
Tabuchi tweeted that the flight was suspended after nearly nine hours because the crew had reached the number of hours in which he was legally allowed to work. The reporter then explained that it took another thirty minutes before the plane reached the gate and passengers got off the plane again.
To be fair, this is not such a rare situation: last July, passengers on a TUI flight had to leave the airport overnight because the crew had worked too many hours. While, even earlier, another group of travelers disembarked from a Qantas plane with no hotel to go to.
