KEY POINTS:
An Air New Zealand plane with 78 passengers on board was forced to divert to Tonga and return to Auckland yesterday after having to abort its landing in Niue.
The flight that normally takes three-and-a-half hours turned into an ordeal lasting almost 10 for passengers, who last night faced a wait of two days for the next flight to Niue.
A technical malfunction with the approach lights at Niue's Hanan Airport forced the 737 plane to abandon its landing and then go into an hour-long holding pattern while engineers unsuccessfully tried to fix the problem.
With the plane using up fuel, the 737 diverted to Tonga to refuel. It then returned to Auckland early yesterday morning, where the passengers spent a frustrating day waiting for news on a flight back to the small Pacific island.
Finally, at 5pm, Air New Zealand told passengers the rescheduled flight would leave tomorrow evening.
The airline was chartering another flight tomorrow morning for technicians, as no one on Niue could make the repairs.
Aviation rules prohibit any aircraft from landing when the approach lights aren't working, even by day.
Passengers were told the plane couldn't fly from Tonga to Niue because the flight crew would have exceeded flight hours limits by having to then return to New Zealand.
Meanwhile, 46 passengers booked on the return flight to Auckland were stranded in Niue. Although Air New Zealand wasn't responsible for the aborted flight, it put passengers up in the Hotel Grand Chancellor in Mangere, near the airport, on Saturday.
Passengers told Herald on Sunday they were impressed with how the cabin crew handled the flight but were frustrated by the lack of updates yesterday. Some had children, and many had cold-bins of frozen food they were taking to the island.
Friends Joan Evans, Janet Powell and Margaret James, from Clevedon and Coromandel, could only watch their long-anticipated island holiday trickle away. "It's been a long day," said Evans. The airline offered to continue to provide accommodation at the hotel for passengers not from Auckland until Monday's flight, and taxi chits for Aucklanders to go home.
Tina Tavita was longing to return to her six-year-old son after having an operation on Monday and three weeks travelling around Australia for work. "I wanted to recover in common surroundings, so I'm not very happy about this."
Several dignitaries were aboard the plane, including Niue's deputy premier, Fisa Pihigia.
Air New Zealand yesterday played down the incident, saying no one was put at risk during the flight. "At no point was there ever any concern for customer safety," a spokesman told the Herald on Sunday.
Normally the once-a-week flight between Auckland and Niue takes three-and-a-half hours.
But with the aborted landing, circling, refuelling and the diversions to Tonga and then Auckland, passengers spent a total of nearly 10 hours on board because they had not been allowed to disembark at Tonga.
This is not the first time the tiny Pacific island nation has run into power problems.
Located about 600km east of Tonga, and with a population of about 1700, Niue is 100 per cent dependent on diesel generation for its power supply. Last year a fire at its sole power station badly damaged the generation plant and control equipment, and temporary generation kit was installed. The power crisis also forced Air New Zealand to run a daylight flight from Auckland to Niue instead of the scheduled late-night 737 service on Fridays.
Air New Zealand is the sole airline serving Niue, taking over after Polynesian Airlines which stopped flying there in November 2005.
