Delta Airline Emergency Landing Dublin Airport 16/04/2012

On Monday (16/04/2012) the Crew of Delta flight 073 operating from Istanbul Turkey to New York JFK Airport found what they described as a very suspicious and "grim" looking device in one of the rest rooms and made initial call to Dublin ATC centre frequency and declared their intentions to divert to Dublin immediately. Runway in use was 16 the southerlt runway, but this runway is only 6,800 feet long and as the aircraft would be landing "heavy" the crew requested the longer easterly runway 10 at 8,200 fet in length.

The crew decided that holding to burn off fuel simply wasnt an option, as after they cleared the area around the rest room and re-seated the passengers, one male passenger ran to the rest room in question stating he needed to retrieve something. As it transpired this passenger owned the mobile phone and was charging it in the rest room with what was described as a "home-made" charger held together with lots of insulating tape, and was connected in the rest room to one of the shaving plugs. On arrival in Dublin the extra weight of the fuel caused the brakes to over heat slightly which is why the fire crews stayed on the scene for so long after.

The aircraft was parked remotely at the northern corner of the airport on a disused runway, and afer the security alert had been sorted out, the aircraft re-fuelled and departed several hours later ti JFK.


Our Thanks to Jonathan McDonnell, Michael Kelly & elevationair for the use of their photographs. Please see their flickr pages at the bottom of the page

Michael Kelly's flickr page

Jonathan McDonnell's flickr page

elevationair's flickr page