Passengers on Hawaiian Airlines Flight 51 were prepared for an 11-hour journey from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Honolulu, Hawaii. However, their flight scheduled to depart on Tuesday didn’t take off until Wednesday, 33 hours later. Was the flight canceled and rescheduled, with the airline booking hotel rooms for the stranded passengers? No, it was delayed for 33 hours.
The initial delay was called after the crew smelled fumes during a pre-departure cabin check. The fumes were caused by an oil leak in the plane’s auxiliary power unit mounted in the tail cone. WNBC reported that the passengers were kept in the dark about the reason for the delay that stretched on for hours. A passenger told the station, “Every time they delay it, they don’t give us a real reason for the delay. We learned that there was a malfunction of some kind, a mechanical issue of some kind, that needed to be remedied and they said that the part needed to be flown in from Atlanta, Georgia.”
A Hawaiian Airlines spokesperson told <