Why a Canada-bound flight had to make a critical U-turn to Amsterdam

More than 250 passengers heading to Toronto from Amsterdam this week ended up stuck on a plane to nowhere for more than five hours after the airline accidentally flew an aircraft overdue for maintenance.

KLM flight KL691, scheduled to leave the airline’s hub at Amsterdam Schiphol at 11:20 a.m. on Monday, faced some standard delays at first, eventually taking off at 12:51 p.m.

But the hour-and-a-half delay soon became the least of travellers’ worries, as, about a quarter of the way into the eight-plus-hour trek, pilots had to divert right back to AMS.

The reason? A maintenance issue — technically, an “acceptable deferred defect (ADD)” that had been deferred a little too long.

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If it had continued on its trip, the 12-year-old Airbus A330-300 would have ended up passing a critical maintenance deadline while in the air.

Passing the deadline would mean that the plane wasn’t legal to fly in line with the industry’s standard Minimum Equipment List (MEL), which, in the words of Transport Canada, is “an approved document created specifically to regulate the dispatch of an aircraft type with inoperative equipment.”

Unfortunately, the required servicing could not be completed at the destination airport, Toronto Pearson.

The kicker is that the original departure delay was due to KLM swapping the plane at the last minute, with no one realizing until they were mid-air over the Atlantic Ocean that the replacement craft also had a problem.

In total, customers wasted more than five hours in the air, ending up right back where they started at Schiphol at 6:35 p.m. on Monday.