Trinidad: CAL plane in midflight turnaround to Canada after technical difficulties

(Trinidad Guardian) Af­ter one hour of fly­ing from Toron­to’s Pear­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port (YYZ) to Port-of-Spain, a Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) flight sud­den­ly be­gan ex­pe­ri­enc­ing tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties and was forced to re­turn to Cana­da.

The plane land­ed a short while ago at Pear­son In­ter­na­tion­al and pas­sen­gers on board were said to be very trau­ma­tised. Some of them be­gan pray­ing loud­ly af­ter the plane was forced to turn around and re­turn to its start­ing point, the T&T Guardian was told.

“It was a hor­ri­ble land­ing, very rough and fast,” one pas­sen­ger who did not want to be iden­ti­fied said from Cana­da a short while ago.

The pas­sen­ger added that when the pi­lot an­nounced that the flight had to turn around, every­one ini­tial­ly thought it was a joke.

The flight de­part­ed from Pear­son In­ter­na­tion­al at 10.53 pm from ter­mi­nal 3 and up­on its emer­gency re­turn land­ed at 12.01 am af­ter it was redi­rect­ed by avi­a­tion au­thor­i­ties in Cana­da.

But pas­sen­gers said they re­main in the dark as to why the pi­lot was forced to re­turn, as they were not giv­en any full ex­pla­na­tion save that “one of the in­stru­ments turned off in the cock­pit.”

The flight was sched­uled to ar­rive at the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port at 4.40 am to­day.

An email sent to CAL’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er Dionne Ligoure went unan­swered up un­til the time this sto­ry was post­ed.

The T&T Guardian will up­date this sto­ry as soon as more in­for­ma­tion comes to hand.