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Nightmare flight cancelled after 8.5 hour delay on tarmac.
A United Airlines flight due to fly from Newark to Denver on August 22nd taxied for so long on a New York runway, it eventually ran out of fuel.
According to reports, flight UA356 stayed on the runway for more than six hours, before returning to the terminal as it “no longer had enough fuel”.
New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi shared her experience of the flight on Twitter.
You can’t make this up.. my United flight out of Newark taxied on the tarmac for more than 6 hours and now **no longer has enough fuel** to get to Denver — so we are taxiing back to the terminal.
Advertisement— Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) August 23, 2022
As the plane returned to the terminal, passengers were told to disembark the plane so that it could be refuelled before reboarding.
Once they had deplaned, passengers received an alert on the United Airlines smartphone app, notifying them that the flight had been cancelled.
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Airline staff assured the passengers that the flight was still on, convincing everybody to board the plane again.
Once all passengers were in their seats for a second time, they were met with further delays and remained on the tarmac for another two hours.
“Oh my god, after 8.5 hours on the tarmac at Newark, and disembarking/reembarking/refueling the plane, the flight is a no-go,” tweeted Tabuchi.
In a cruel conclusion to the incident, the Boeing 737-900 was again sent back to the terminal as the crew had exceeded their work hours.
Tabuchi tweeted: “We are heading back to the gate a final time. This time, it’s the crew – they’ve clocked out. ‘I’ve run out of apologies,’ the pilot just told us.”
Passengers were reportedly given only a cup of water and a “tiny packet of those Biscoff cookies” throughout the eight and a half hour delay.
The reporter recalls it took another half an hour to get to the gate and disembark again, with passengers sat on the aircraft, not going anywhere, for a total of nine hours, “burning fuel the whole time”.
She eventually flew out to Denver from Philadelphia the following morning, after taking an Amtrak train to the city.
