Passengers take 16-hour flight to nowhere after Auckland to New York U-turn

Passengers boarding a trans-Pacific flight from Auckland to New York on Thursday evening had no idea of the rude awakening that awaited them: a 16-hour ordeal that saw them back at square one.

Air New Zealand Ltd. Flight NZ2 should have touched down at John F. Kennedy International Airport Terminal 1 at 5:40 pm local time, but a power outage threw operations into disarray, affecting at least 135 flights into and out of the city.

Data from Flightradar24’s website showed the Boeing 787 jet making a u-turn about halfway into its nearly 9,000-mile (14,000 kilometer) journey over the Pacific Ocean, just south of Hawaii. The turnaround made the jet the top-tracked flight on the site, which monitors aircraft all over the world in real time.