United Airlines passengers faced a flight to nowhere after a plumbing malfunction on their transatlantic journey.
Sunday’s Flight 331 took off from Paris around 5 p.m. local time and was scheduled to land in Washington, DC, eight hours later.
However, just over an hour into the journey, the Boeing 767 turned around, per data from Flightradar24.
The plane changed direction while flying over the sea between Scotland and Ireland, and headed back toward France.
It landed back at Charles de Gaulle Airport two and a half hours after taking off.
In a statement shared with Business Insider, a United spokesperson said the plane had to divert to “address an issue with the lavatories.”
“The flight landed safely, and customers were rebooked onto the next available flight to their destination,” they added.
Data from Flightradar24 shows the same Boeing 767 departed Paris again 25 hours later.
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It touched down at Washington Dulles International Airport shortly before 9 p.m. ET on Monday.
This isn’t the first time that a flight has been forced to turn around due to a plumbing issue.
In March, Air India passengers faced a nine-hour flight to nowhere as their Delhi-bound plane returned to Chicago after most of the plane’s bathrooms stopped working.
The airline said its investigation found “polythene bags, rags, and clothes that had been flushed down and stuck in the plumbing.”
In April 2024, another United Airlines transatlantic flight ended up back where it started when the toilets overflowed. The plane had left Frankfurt for San Francisco before circling over the North Sea.
And a month before that, eight of the nine bathrooms on a KLM Boeing 787 stopped working, too.
Overall, such incidents are fairly rare, but they can force diversions due to the minimum requirements for passengers’ bathroom facilities.
Returning to where the plane took off can make it easier for an airline to reroute passengers and repair any issues, as it is likely to have more facilities at an airport it commonly flies to.
