Faulty loos enforce flight plan change
A packed Austrian Airlines (AUA) jet heading for Russia was forced to return to Austria when all of its toilets stopped working.The aviation industry company said today (Thurs) that the Airbus A321 bound for Moscow Domodedovo Airport (DME) flew back to Vienna International Airport (VIA or VIE) on Tuesday after passengers informed its crew around an hour after take-off that none of the washrooms seemed to operate properly.The pilot decided to fly back to VIA instead of resuming the flight to DME which lasts around three hours overall. AUA argued that there would have been no chance to fix the defects at DME before the plane was scheduled to fly back to VIA.Reports have it that some of the flightÂ’s 175 passengers decided not to board the surrogate jet around two hours later as they had already missed appointments in Moscow by then.The incident was preceded by a series of technical errors forcing Fokker planes operated by AUA to carry out emergency landings.AUA was acquired by the German Lufthansa Group in September 2009. The former Austrian flagship carrier had 2.1 million passengers in the first three months of this year, down by around one per cent compared to the equal time span of 2010.