One flight from Emirates and one from Bangkok Airways were forced to land at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, two AirAsia flights landed at Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport, one from Jetstar diverted to Penang, and a Qater Airways flight landed in Kuala Lumpur.
Five flights due to take off from Phuket were delayed – two from Thai International, and one each from AirAsia, Orient Thai and Bangkok Airways.
The 8:30 pm Air Berlin flight from Phuket to Abu Dhabi in the UAE caught fire after takeoff around 10 pm last night (December 20), with 249 passengers on board.
With flames pouring from the left engine of the Airbus A330-200 aircraft, the captain managed to circle and put the aircraft back down on the runway in Phuket at 9:30 pm, bursting three tyres in the process.
Island resident Chanut 'Tum' Nawranong was aboard the Bangkok Airways flight into Phuket that spent 30 minutes circling over Phuket before returning to Bangkok, unable to land because of the Air Berlin flight's emergency landing.
Ms Chanut told The Phuket News she was due to fly from Bangkok to Phuket at 7.45pm, aboard a Bangkok Airways flight that was due to arrive around 9pm in Phuket.
But while the plane was in mid-air the crew made an announcement.
“The announcement came from the cockpit that there had been an incident with an aircraft in Phuket, and it was still on the runway and they were unable to move it.
[The pilot] said we would need to circle around the island for about 15 to 20 minutes because the plane had made an emergency landing.”
The Bangkok Airways plane circled for 30 minutes, but was unable to land at Phuket, or Surat Thani or Krabi, so the decision was made to return to Bangkok.
“We arrived at Suvarnabhumi at around 11pm, and the ground staff told us the next flight was leaving at 4.30am. It wasn’t worth trying to get a hotel, so I decided to stay in the Bangkok Airways lounge, which was full of passengers from two flights.”
But the worst part was that Ms Chanut’s boyfriend, British expat Duncan Worthington, spent two hours waiting for her flight in Phuket and didn’t know what had happened.
“They said there was a delay but it was very difficult for him to get information. He didn’t know what was happening at Phuket airport, and he wondered if something had happened at Suvarnabhumi.”
She said there was a lack of communication about what was happening, and it was very hard to get information.
“It has happened to me before. Quite a while ago I was on the Thai Airways flight and we left Suvarnabhumi. We were flying for 20 minutes and the captain said there was smoke in the middle of the airplane, and we needed to return. The pilot was very good at that time.”