Miami-Bound SAS A330 Diverts To Copenhagen After 10+ Hours

Maintenance could definitely have been done in Miami. However, as congested as Miami is, I can't imagine how long it would have been to "get on the standby list" for both hangar space and qualified maintenance to perform it.

“While I wouldn’t always trust this data to be 100% accurate, Flightradar24 suggests that the jet dropped from 36,000 feet to 27,000 feet in a very short period of time.”

What’s more likely, the plane dropped 9k feet from record-shattering turbulence or the pilots immediately descended to better air? Pretty sure Ian talked about this on the podcast fairly recently regarding a similar incident where the media took FR24 data out of context. Alas, only time will tell…

The last time something similar happened was probably an ANA 77W flew like 4 hours out of LAX, with John Legend and Chrissy Teigen in F, before they found someone without a valid ticket and flew back to offload that person. This was the headline on Good Morning America that day lol.

Letting someone that shouldn't have boarded board also happened to JAL in Paris once, thankfully they'd just pushed back from the gate.

SAS put their cost before the customer, not to mention the flight crew probably didn't watch the radar religiously enough and flew into clouds they shouldn't have. But that's why their finances have been crap for so many years, a cycle we see all too often.

After watching a 2 liter ( 4.5 lb ) soda bottle flying up to the ceiling, I imagine the cabin suffered quite a bit of damage. While going to Copenhagen was inconvenient for the passengers, it was the correct action.

The diversion wasn't safety-related, the plane was closer to MIA than to CPH. It doesn't mean it wasn't the correct course of action, but it was about operational convenience for SAS rather than anything else.

I read this story and it seems like it was someone who had a UA instead of an ANA ticket.

And it's quite understandable, given the JV and flight times, I have quite literally mistaken my ANA departure gate with the UA one as well, except it's at SFO.

Can't fly back to ARN.

The real reason they diverted to CPH.
Crazy Greta was waiting to tell the pilots How dare you.

Are there no aircraft maintenance facilities in Miami!? Or one of the airports closer to where the aircraft was - could have gone to Chicago where SAS has a huge partnership with United (could obtain maintenance support). For shame. Wonder what the ACTUAL reason to turn back was?

Very strange tale. They could have diverted to a closer Airport or go on to Miami. United and SAS have a huge partnership- go to ORD and get maintenance done on the aircraft there. Makes you think there is MORE to the story.

Yep, everything's a conspiracy

Yes, or perhaps your testes haven't descnded!?

first, commercial relationships have nothing to do with maintenance contracts.
United does not fly A330s and it is doubtful that UA does or ever has done anything other than on-call line maintenance for SK.

SK's new partner DL is one of the world's largest operators of the A330 and has major hubs at BOS, JFK and ATL as well as does major service for that aircraft - although heavily at MSP.

However, the flight was about as close to the US at the time of the turbulence incident as it was to CPH.

As much as some struggle to understand the rationale, SK probably did make the best decision based on the location of the incident.
There is no type of extensive maintenance support for any aircraft flying over Greenland.

This headline is incorrect. The flight didn’t divert “after” 10 hours, but after five hours or so. The entire flight lasted 10-ish hours.

There's no conspiracy. It was logistically simpler to return to Copenhagen (and presumably get the aircraft back in the air more quickly) than to please a few hundred customers yet cause significant logistical delays that would lead to greater overall financial losses. A few rebooked tickets and/or flight coupons is negligible.

What's so hard to understand here? As TD says above, it's not as if Greenland has some mega-hub maintenance facility, and even if it did... the aforementioned passengers would still need to get to their destination at some point.

Thanks for totally derailing my comment, Darren. My post was regarding suspected misinterpretation of ADS-B data.

UA does not operate A330s... maybe that was the reason they couldn't rely on UA's maintenance teams at ORD?

Increasing severity of turbulence is related to climate change.
Greta is not crazy, dude.

Well, climate change is real, but Greta is still crazy.

Wonder if any of the SAS MM challengers were on this flight??

Yes that's what I said.

Greetings from Airline Maintenance Management!
I thought before I even got to the company's statement, "Oh, I bet it was for MX."
And while, yes Lucky, you CAN have a third party do the inspection, in theory.... it's not the best idea. First, conditional inspections such as this require properly trained personnel for most carriers, and a vendor may not have such personnel. Additionally, should any damage be found, a Euro carrier doesn't want their plane in Miami any more than a US carrier would want their plane stuck in Scandinavia.
It just adds a huge, thick layer of complexity and inconvenience for all involved.

So, I suspect that, given the same situation they faced, I'd have made the same decision. Bring the plane to home base, deal with the fallout with the highest level of control we can establish.

As far as I know, there is no A330 maintenance base in Greenland, Iceland or Miami. Probably the closest one would have been AC in YUL or YYZ (I don’t know where they do A330s), but that’s a third country where some pax might experience difficulties entering. So that left them with MSP (DL) or back to CPH (their own). Both hugely inconvenient for everyone on board, but I guess CPH is still the better option.

CPH was chosen after bananas were discovered in the galley...

@JJ and Eskimo...so I gather that you equate persons with Asperger's syndrome as "crazy"?
Educate yourselves...she's done more good in her 21 years than you'll ever accomplish.