Japanese flight with over 300 passengers sent back to starting point after 7-hour nightmare

More than 300 domestic flight passengers in Japan had a nightmare on Sunday when their two hour flight was forced into over a seven hour ordeal for missing the destination airport’s “deadline”. Japan Airlines Co. flight JL331 was scheduled to leave Tokyo’s Haneda Airport for a two-hour top journey to Fukuoka at 6:30 pm local time but due to a last-minute plane switch, the takeoff was delayed by nearly 90 minutes, Bloomberg reported. As a consequence, the airline missed the airport’s 10pm curfew time for commercial planes and was sent back.

The situation unfolded despite earlier expectations that the flight would land with 4 minutes to spare, the airline said in a statement. As per Fukuoka airport officials, they do make exceptions for bad weather or congestion, allowing late-running planes past the curfew time however they told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper that they didn’t regard this airline’s delay as “unavoidable”.