Power outage affects flights
NEW YORK — A power outage in a terminal of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport stretched into a second day Friday after forcing some flights to be canceled or diverted, including one that was turned around and sent back to New Zealand after nearly making it to the U.S.
The airport’s operator said in a tweet late Thursday that Terminal 1, which handles some of the airport’s international flights, would remain closed Friday “due to electrical issues.”
The outage was caused by an electrical panel failure that led to a small fire, authorities said.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs New York’s major airports, said it was working to accommodate affected flights at JFK’S four other active terminals.
The agency did not say how many flights were canceled or diverted, but thousands of travelers were likely affected.
Some planes were forced to return to their points of origin.
Kelly Shea, who owns a travel agency in Indianapolis, said she heard from clients Thursday who spent eight hours on a flight from Milan … to Milan.
The clients were flying home to Indiana through New York when the plane turned around. When they returned to the Milan airport, the couple told Shea that the ticket counter was “chaos,” with people screaming.
Shea said the best she could do was book a return flight for them on Sunday, three days after they were supposed to be back in Indiana.
An Air New Zealand flight was two-thirds of the way across the Pacific Ocean when it had to make a U-turn and head back to Auckland. The flight landed back in New Zealand after more than 16 hours in the air.
Air New Zealand officials said the flight turned back because diverting it to another U.S. airport could have stranded it where it couldn’t make planned connections with other scheduled passengers. Passengers on the diverted jet were booked on other flights.
Terminal 1 at Kennedy opened in the late 1990s. It is scheduled to be replaced by a new, $9.5 billion terminal now under construction. Groundbreaking was initially supposed to happen in 2020 but was delayed until last summer by the COVID-19 pandemic.