A few dozen international flying customers got a special treat – a quick peek at beautiful Bangor, Maine – on their flight from Cancun to London.
Imagine – dressed to the nines in first class sipping a martini and suddenly your seat-mate gets slapped with a pair of cuffs.
Helluva way to ruin a quick flight over the pond to London, eh mate?
The incident involved two disruptive passengers who forced a TUI Airways flight to divert to Maine.
TUI flight 49 from Cancun to London landed at Bangor International Airport around 9:20 p.m. local time on July 8 “after the crew reported a passenger disturbance,” the Federal Aviation Administration told USA TODAY.
“The flight departed from Cancun International Airport in Mexico and was headed to London Gatwick Airport in England,” the agency said.
The flight left Cancun around 4 p.m. local time, according to flight-tracking site Flightradar24. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said the plane stopped in Maine “due to an in-flight altercation between two passengers.”
“Upon arrival, CBP officers removed both individuals from the aircraft, and they were returned to their home countries on separate outbound flights,” they said in an emailed statement.
A direct flight from Cancun to London typically follows a route that crosses the Atlantic Ocean, according to DirectFlights.com.
The flight path is roughly northwest, crossing over the Gulf of Mexico, the eastern United States, and then the Atlantic, before reaching the United Kingdom.
The flight distance is approximately 4,983 miles and the flight time is around 9 hours and 35 minutes.
But of course that doesn’t include a stopover in Bangor, Maine.
The New York Post said the stopover in Bangor ended up stranding passengers for 17 hours – due to the two blokes who the captain wrote up for smoking in the bathroom.
The aircraft had been flying for about an hour when the pilot came on the intercom and announced that two passengers had been “smoking in the toilet” and that he’d have to make an unscheduled landing if they persisted, UK native Terry Lawrance told the Post.
The Post blamed the diversion on “a pair of butt-huffing bozos puffing cigarettes on board.”
Bangor is a popular “tourist” haven for “unruly” passengers who’ve had too many gimlets as well as international flights that have a mechanical problem and need an emergency landing.
Another recent such case involved United Airlines flight 883 from London to Newark. Two passengers, who airline officials said “appeared intoxicated,” were removed from the plane and were banned from future United flights.
A federal court judge ordered one of the passengers to pay the airline $20,000.
Bangor International “has a distinctive reputation as a hub for aircraft diversions,” according to SimpleFlying.com.
“This phenomenon results from a unique combination of strategic location, historical precedence, operational readiness, and comprehensive facilities geared explicitly towards accommodating unexpected landings,” the website reports.
Bangor is an ideal destination for diversions because it’s located “near the ‘Great Circle Route,’” SimpleFlying explained.
The Great Circle Route is “the path an aircraft follows when flying the most-direct route, which is along the arc of a great circle on a sphere,” according to the National Geographic Society.
John Cox, a veteran international flight captain, told The Maine Wire that “Bangor is a good stop if you have a problem just before you go over the ocean.”
Cox explained that since the earth is a sphere, and not flat, the Great Circle Route “is the shortest distance between two points and it takes you across Bangor.”
