Minneapolis-to-London Flight Takes Lengthy Duluth Detour

The 255 passengers and 10 crew members aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 44 out of Minneapolis should have been arriving in London Sunday about 3 a.m. Twin Cities time.

Instead, most of them were sitting on a Duluth runway, prepared to depart, when they got word that the plane wasn't leaving. It was too heavy to take off from the shorter Duluth runway.

They'd spent the previous five hours stuck on the tarmac after the DC-10 made an emergency landing there. An electrical problem in an entertainment system caused smoke to appear in part of the cabin.

The wait, which lasted another five or six hours, included a self-service chicken and pasta dinner, unheated egg sandwiches for breakfast, and a few-hour delay to find the luggage of a few passengers who wanted to be flown back to Minneapolis on a different plane.

"It was a comedy of errors, it really was," said passenger Sean Toohey of Woodbury.

"Northwest apologizes for the inconvenience the delay caused the passengers," said Dean Breest, a spokesman for the airline.

The journey turned out to be little more than a really big hassle: All the passengers ultimately were taken back to Minneapolis, and new flights were booked.

Still, for passengers such as Caroline Askew, attempting to get home to London with her husband and their 2-year-old and 6-month-old girls, it was a bad dream that might not end until this morning.

The make-up flight that the Askews and most of the other passengers got booked on was scheduled to leave about midnight Sunday.

"That is amazingly trying," Askew said of having a baby and a toddler to care for on a stalled airplane for roughly 14 hours.

"We have kids who don't easily fall asleep," she said. She added that Ella, the 2-year-old, eventually cried herself into a slumber during the delay.

Breest had few details about the sequence of events, but did say that the airline had made sure to provide hotel accommodations to passengers once they returned to Minneapolis, and to line up new flights for them.

According to accounts from Toohey and Askew, the problem on board arose about an hour and a half after the 7 p.m. flight took off Saturday.

Few could see the smoke, but there was a distinct electrical-burning odor in the air. The plane changed course and touched down in Duluth about 9:50 p.m.

To repair the electrical problem, mechanics and parts had to be flown in from Minneapolis. Later, a second plane followed to bring in new crew members to relieve some of the original ones.

Although the diverted plane was fixed, the passengers were split up about 9 a.m. Sunday onto the other two planes and one or more buses to get back to Minneapolis.

Askew and Toohey said they received $50 travel vouchers for a Northwest flight of $200 or more.

It's doubtful the Askews will use theirs.

"This is it," Nic Askew told his wife at one point during the ordeal. "Never again are we flying Northwest."

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