After a United Airlines flight U-turned and landed back in Newark, passengers reached London 11 hours later than expected, and after their original plane.
Thursday’s Flight 934 took off from Newark Liberty International Airport shortly after 9 a.m.
However, data from Flightradar24 shows that just around 20 minutes later, the Boeing 767 turned around short of Boston.
It then circled half a dozen times over upstate New York before landing back at Newark, 1 hour and 45 minutes after departing from there.
Returning to the flight’s origin, known as a flight to nowhere, can make it easier to reroute passengers or fix any issues with the aircraft. Newark is one of United’s seven hub airports.
A United spokesperson said the flight “returned to Newark to address a possible maintenance issue.”
The 767 involved in the incident, registered as N684UA, is 22 years old.
“The flight landed safely, and all passengers deplaned normally at the gate,” the spokesperson said. “We arranged for a different aircraft to take our customers to London, which landed at 7:30 a.m. local time on Friday.”
Flight-tracking data shows the second flight, UAL934D, took off from Newark shortly after 8 p.m.
That means passengers had a nine-hour wait in New Jersey before they were back on their way to London.
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The first plane was scheduled to touch down in England at 8:40 p.m. local time Thursday, but ultimately, passengers arrived just over 11 hours later.
Meanwhile, flight-tracking data shows the plane with the “possible maintenance issue” arrived in London first on Friday morning.
After diverting back to Newark, N684UA also operated Thursday’s Flight 14.
It took off at 7:21 p.m. ET and landed in London at 6:58 a.m. local time, 24 minutes before UAL934D.
A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration told Business Insider it didn’t have a report about the flight.