On Sunday, over 300 domestic flight passengers in Japan experienced a nightmare when their two-hour flight turned into a seven-hour ordeal due to missing the destination airport’s curfew deadline. Japan Airlines Co. flight JL331 was supposed to depart from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 6:30 pm local time and arrive in Fukuoka after a two-hour flight. However, due to a last-minute plane change, the takeoff was delayed by almost 90 minutes, causing the airline to miss the commercial plane curfew time of 10 pm at the destination airport. As a result, the plane was sent back. Bloomberg reported on the incident.
After missing the 10 pm curfew time, the airline set back on a roundabout journey to Tokyo again. The Bloomberg report added that initially a plan to re-route the flight to nearest city of Kitakyushu was looked at but owing to difficulty in making the last-minute accommodation arrangements for the 335 passengers travelling onboard, the plan was abandoned.
Rather, pilots were redirected about 450 kilometres from their original destination to Kansai International Airport near Osaka, landing at 10:59pm, the report added citing the airline officials. But passengers’ woes did not end here since this destination did not either have enough accommodation arrangements for these many passengers and the flight took off again.
Into the skies on pre-dawn Monday, the flight eventually landed back in Japan’s capital almost seven hours after it took off. The airline said it compensated the passengers by paying for hotels and taxis. It also paid in cash and replacement flight to make up for the unlucky travelling experience for its customers.
