A TUI Boeing 787 first officer just lately turned incapacitated throughout a transatlantic flight, resulting in an surprising 24-hour stopover for passengers in Maine.
TUI flight to Orlando diverts to Bangor
British constitution airline TUI Airways operates a as soon as weekly flight from Doncaster, United Kingdom (DSA), to Melbourne, Florida (MLB), utilizing a Boeing 787-8. For these not acquainted with Melbourne, that’s close to Orlando, and the airport has been sued by the Better Orlando Aviation Authority for making an attempt to market itself as an Orlando airport.
Maybe that route is the primary attention-grabbing a part of the story. TUI Airways has an interesting lengthy haul route community, because the airline seasonally flies to Melbourne, Florida from Belfast, Birmingham, Doncaster, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London Gatwick, Manchester, and Newcastle. Superb, eh? Anyway…
On October 16, 2022, the Doncaster to Melbourne flight didn’t fairly go as deliberate. Flight BY564 was operated by a roughly 9 12 months outdated Dreamliner with the license plate G-TUIB. Because the airplane accomplished its transatlantic crossing, the primary officer turned incapacitated, apparently on account of meals poisoning (yep, like that scene in “Airplane!”).
TUI solely has two pilots on this 4,276-mile, ~8.5 hour flight. So the captain declared a “PAN” (non-life threatening emergency), and requested a diversion to Bangor, Maine (BGR). A flight attendant got here as much as the cockpit to help, however presumably wasn’t doing something on the controls. The airplane ended up touchdown safely in Bangor round 6hr10min after departing from the UK.
You possibly can hear the audio between the captain and air visitors controller beneath.
Issues turned much more sophisticated in Bangor
Clearly the precedence in aviation is all the time security — each for the one who turned incapacitated, and for everybody onboard. At this level you had a 288-seat jet on the bottom at an airport with very restricted air service, which often doesn’t get any worldwide flights.
It’s additionally not like TUI Airways has any reserve pilots on name in Bangor, so this was a difficult state of affairs. Lengthy story quick, the airplane, passengers, and crew, ended up spending almost 24 hours on the bottom in Bangor, and continued to Melbourne the next day.
The flight landed from Doncaster just a little after 2PM on October 16, and departed to Melbourne just a little after 2PM on October 17. It’s not clear if the primary officer began to really feel higher and was capable of fly the next day, or if the airline someway flew in an additional pilot from some place else (since TUI has lower than day by day frequencies in most markets, it’s doable a pilot flew in from one other airport in North America). The flight all the way down to Melbourne ended up taking 3hr8min.
What I’d be fascinated to know is how the logistics in Bangor labored:
- Presumably passengers needed to clear immigration, but the airport doesn’t ordinarily get worldwide flights; are there some immigration brokers for personal jets, and/or some who may be known as in, or how did everybody get screened?
- Discovering sufficient lodge rooms for (probably) ~300 folks isn’t any small job
Backside line
A transatlantic TUI Airways flight from Doncaster to Melbourne diverted to Bangor, after the primary officer turned incapacitated on account of meals poisoning. The airplane and passengers ended up spending roughly 24 hours on the bottom in Bangor, earlier than persevering with to their last vacation spot. The logistics there should have been attention-grabbing.
What do you make of this TUI Airways diversion?
