- A Delta flight diverted to a mid-Atlantic island after an indication of an engine problem.
- Passengers were stuck on Terceira, part of the Portuguese island chain, the Azores for more than a day.
- The airline sent another A330 from New York to pick up the passengers.
Delta Air Lines had to send a plane to rescue passengers after their flight diverted to a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Flight 127 departed Madrid around 1 p.m. local time on Sunday and was supposed to land in New York seven hours later.
However, data from Flightradar24 shows how four hours into the journey, the Airbus A330 turned around over the ocean.
Roughly an hour later, it landed at Lajes Airport on the Portuguese island of Terceira. It's part of the Azores, a remote archipelago that's nearly 1,000 miles away from the country's mainland.
The airport shares its runway with a military base, and only serves about a dozen destinations commercially.
"As safety comes before all else at Delta, the flight crew followed procedures to divert to Lajes, Azores, after indication of a mechanical issue with an engine," said an airline spokesperson.
The 21-year-old A330, registered as N805NW, is still parked at the airport as of Wednesday.
To get the passengers back on their way, Delta had to send another plane from New York.
About five hours after Flight 127 landed in the Azores, flight-tracking data shows another A330 left JFK Airport.
It arrived at Lajes shortly after 2 a.m. local time, before leaving around 9 p.m. on Monday.
Flight 9927 then landed in New York at 10:22 p.m. ET — roughly 31 hours after passengers expected to touch down on US soil.
"We sincerely apologize to our customers for their experience and delay in their travels," the Delta spokesperson said.
While it isn't clear how many people were on board, a Delta A330-300 can carry up to 282 passengers.
This isn't the first time a Delta plane has been forced to divert to Lajes Airport. In 2023, a flight from Ghana landed there due to a "mechanical issue with a backup oxygen system."
In that incident, passengers spent 12 hours on the island and some complained about a lack of communication from Delta before another plane arrived to take them on to New York.
Airlines typically try to divert flights back to their origins or hub airports when possible, because this makes it easier to reroute passengers and repair any problems with the aircraft. However, in cases like these, concerns about safety can require landing at the closest available airport.
In a similar case last year, Air France had to cancel a flight so the plane could be used to rescue passengers who were diverted to a remote town in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut.
