The incident took place on Flight SQ833 which was scheduled to operate from Shanghai (PVG) to Singapore (SIN), departing at 4:50 pm and arriving at 10:20 pm. An 11-year-old Airbus A380 with the registration code 9V-SKT operated the 2,357-mile flight.
Hundreds of passengers were trapped on an A380 aircraft of a Singapore Airlines flying from Shanghai to Singapore on Wednesday, 6th August for roughly eight hours, without actually flying anywhere. The aircraft pushed back on-time, and taxied out to the runway according to reports, however, the takeoff had to be aborted, due to a technical fault, and the aircraft returned to the gate.
The captain informed passengers that maintenance would have to board the aircraft, and initially requested passengers to be patient for 30 minutes, which then turned into an hour, and then turned into a much longer rolling delay. In the end, passengers had to stay on the aircraft until around 12:30AM, at which point the flight was cancelled.
Passengers were provided with hotel accommodation for the night, although due to the number of passengers, it was 3-4AM before many of them reached their hotels and most of them were then rebooked the following day on the same flight.
The crew reportedly served meals and refreshments during the delay, However, it got incredibly hot in the cabin since the air conditioning had reportedly been turned off several times during this ordeal for maintenance work to be performed.
A Singapore Airlines spokesperson described the incident as follows :
The aircraft returned to the bay and engineers were brought on-site to attempt to rectify the issue. The ground power had to be disabled for safety reasons, while the checks were going on. Customers disembarked the aircraft at 12.30 am and hotel accommodation was arranged while all affected customers were rebooked on Thursday on other flights and have since departed Shanghai. He said they recognised that the passengers could have been permitted to leave the aircraft earlier. “SIA apologises to the affected customers for this and we will review our procedures to avoid a recurrence.”
Even though this is a tough situation, airlines have to do better
It goes without saying that airlines need to do better than keeping passengers trapped on a plane for eight hours. Even with the excellent service on Singapore Airlines, it is extremely uncomfortable, and potentially dangerous for some passengers if the temperature in the cabin is not properly maintained.
In the United States they have the three hour tarmac rule, passengers have to be given the option of disembarking from the aircraft within a much shorter timeframe. This rule came about owing to all the situations where passengers ended up being trapped on planes for extended periods, and often without the friendly service available on Singapore Airlines.
That being said, it is understandable that situations like this can happen.
The pilots presumably genuinely thought the issue could be resolved fairly quickly. If the issue could be resolved quickly, it would be much more efficient to keep everyone onboard as otherwise it could lead to a significant additional delay, since bags of passengers who choose not to travel need to be offloaded.
Even as the rolling delay continued, pilots probably thought that a fix could happen any minute, since it would have been kind of weird to say four hours in “hey, we still don’t have a solution, but you can get off the aircraft now, if you prefer”
Everyone has the goal of getting to their final destination as efficiently as possible. If the maintenance problem had been fixed after 30 minutes but passengers had been given the option to deplane, that might have caused an additional hour delay. People would have been annoyed at the airline about that. On the other end of the spectrum, keeping passengers on a plane for eight hours is the other extreme. The carrier’s goal was to probably get everyone on their way as quickly as possible, at some point you just have to at least let people wait in the gate area, because eight hours on a plane without going anywhere is excessive.
