Delta Air Lines passengers stranded in remote Canadian town after technical problems

• Three Delta planes landed at a remote Canadian Air Force base after passengers were stranded.
• The first plane diverted due to a mechanical issue, and couldn’t take off again as crew timed out.
• The second crew also timed out, so the 270 passengers slept in military barracks, per CBS.

Delta Air Lines sent three separate Airbus A330s to a remote Canadian town, where passengers had been left stranded for over 24 hours following their original flight’s emergency landing.

Sunday’s flight from Amsterdam to Detroit landed in Happy Valley-Goose Bay due to a “mechanical issue,” a Delta spokesperson told Business Insider.

Goose Bay is a small international airport about 2,000 kilometers — or 1,200 miles — shy of the plane’s final destination in Detroit. The town in Labrador has a population of around 8,000 but also has a large airfield operated by the Royal Canadian Air Force.

Holly Dubbs, one of the flight’s 270 passengers, was coming home from Europe, where she had been visiting family. She told BIthat the plane was en route to Detroit when she checked the flight tracker and realized it was no longer heading to its final destination.

“Everyone started to panic and everyone was like, ‘Why aren’t we going to Detroit anymore?'” Dubbs told BI. “And no one really was answering any questions.”

Ultimately, passengers learned that there was a problem de-icing one of the plane’s engines, as CBS News previously reported.

Due to freezing conditions in Goose Bay, the plane was unable to take off again before the crew reached their maximum time limit onboard, the Delta spokesperson told BI.

A second A330 was dispatched from Detroit and arrived at Goose Bay seven hours after the first plane, according to data from Flightradar24 — but the crew from this plane also timed out, CBS reported.

All told, Dubbs said, passengers were stuck onboard the grounded plane for about 15 hours before they could leave, at which point they were transferred to nearby military barracks. Dubbs said she arrived at the barracks around 8 a.m., where she had just about three hours before being picked up and taken back to the airport.

On Monday morning, a third A330 was sent from Detroit to Goose Bay, Flightradar24 shows. And despite being told their flight would leave around noon on Monday, they didn’t take off until about 5 p.m., Dubbs said. Passengers eventually landed in Detroit 29 hours after they were initially scheduled, per Flightradar24.

Dubbs, who posted footage of the incident to TikTok on Monday, said that Delta initially offered $100 to stranded passengers who filed complaints.

“We were all like, ‘$100 is not giving us back the dog sitters that we had to pay for an extra day. It’s not taking back the day of work that we lost, the family time that we lost, or the gas that people drove to pick us up in Detroit.”

Dubbs pushed back on the amount, and ultimately got a full refund for her flight, she told BI.

“I believe everyone on that flight deserves a full refund,” Dubbs said. “Because every single one of us just had to be put through the ringer.”

The first two planes, including the one Dubbs eventually got on, have both landed back in Detroit, but the third one has had two cancellations and is now scheduled to depart on Wednesday morning.

“We apologize to customers for this inconvenience,” Delta said in the statement. A spokesperson added that the passengers will be compensated, but declined to provide specifics.