Delta Air Lines flight DL54 turned back to Atlanta on May 9 after spending nearly eight hours over the Atlantic Ocean on a flight bound for Lagos. The Airbus A330-200 made a U-turn midway through the journey and landed safely later that night at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The flight left Atlanta at about 5:42 PM EDT on Saturday and climbed to 33,000 feet before continuing across the Atlantic for several hours. Delta said the diversion was due to operational issues. The airline later canceled a subsequent Lagos-bound service.
DL54 was headed to Lagos Airport on one of Delta’s longest international routes, a trip of more than 5,000 nautical miles, or 9,260 kilometers, that can take up to 11 hours when it runs normally. The Atlanta-to-Lagos service is commonly flown with the Airbus A330-200, one of the carrier’s aging widebody jets used frequently on long-haul international routes.
Widebody turnbacks over the Atlantic are uncommon, but when they happen they can be expensive because they burn hours of flight time, tie up aircraft and ripple through the rest of a day’s schedule. Several of Delta’s A330-200 jets were originally delivered to Northwest Airlines before the two carriers merged in 2008, and those aircraft remain part of the backbone of some of its longest-haul flying.
For passengers booked on the Lagos service, the unanswered issue is not whether the aircraft came back safely — it did — but how quickly Delta can restore the route after a return that erased nearly a full night of flying.
