Passengers took a 16-hour flight to nowhere after their plane to New York U-turned because of an electrical fire at JFK Airport

The Air New Zealand flight returned to its departure point.

Philip Pilosian/Shutterstock.com

• A flight to New York headed back to New Zealand because of an electrical fire at JFK Airport.
• Passengers spent 16 hours on the plane only to return to the airport where they took off.
• An electrical failure in the terminal caused an outage and a "small isolated fire," per JFK Airport.

Passengers spent 16 hours on a plane only to return to their departure point because of a fire at the destination airport.

An Air New Zealand flight bound for New York on Thursday was forced to make a U-turn and head back to Auckland Airport in New Zealand because of an electrical fire in Terminal 1 at JFK Airport, an airline spokesperson told Insider.

JFK Airport said on Twitter that an electrical panel failure in the terminal caused a power outage, as well as a "small isolated fire," which was extinguished straight away. The incident meant that inbound and outbound flights were affected, the airport tweeted on Thursday.

Terminal 1 was closed on Thursday and remained shut on Friday because of electrical issues, per tweets by JFK Airport. The Port Authority was working with airport operators to restore flight operations as soon as possible, the tweets said.

The Air New Zealand flight turned back over the Pacific Ocean, almost halfway between New Zealand and the US West coast, according to tracking site FlightAware.

The Air New Zealand spokesperson said the airline apologized for the disruption caused. "Diverting to another US port would have meant the aircraft would remain on the ground for several days, impacting a number of other scheduled services and customers," the spokesperson said.

Passengers were rebooked onto the next available flight to JFK Airport, the spokesperson added.

JFK Airport didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

The power outage at JFK Airport also caused other flights to divert to their departure airports on Thursday. These included two ITA Airways flights from Milan and Rome, and a Korean Air flight from Seoul, per FlightAware.

Flights to nowhere can occur when an aircraft is unable to land at its destination.

Passengers on an Emirates flight in January took a 13-hour trip to nowhere because of heavy rain and major flooding at Auckland International Airport, meaning the plane couldn't land.

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