A late-night departure from Canada’s Victoria International Airport never made it off the ground last week after a young child would not stay buckled into a seat, forcing the cancellation of the entire flight.
Porter Airlines said the aircraft, operating as flight PD444, had already pushed back from the terminal and was taxiing toward the runway when crew members spotted the child standing on a seat and declining to fasten the seatbelt. Efforts by the child’s parent and members of the cabin crew to secure the belt went nowhere.
“The aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition,” a Porter Airlines spokesperson told PEOPLE. With no way to safely proceed, the crew turned the plane around.
Bringing the aircraft back to the gate set off a cascade of required steps. The affected passengers had to leave the plane, their luggage had to be pulled, and flight plans and related documentation had to be resubmitted. All of that consumed time the flight did not have.
Because the runway at Victoria International shuts down at 12:30 a.m., the delay proved fatal to the schedule, and the airline scrapped the flight altogether. Travelers were left to spend the night in Victoria, finally getting out on a separate flight the following day, August 7, according to Porter. The carrier apologized for the disruption and the knock-on effect it had on other travelers. The family at the center of the episode has not been named publicly.
The grounding follows another aviation safety scare from days before. On August 5, a Batik Air flight traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Kochi saw one of its passengers allegedly try to force open an emergency exit as the plane made its final approach, investigators said. The man, named as 34-year-old Jamshir Athanikkal from the Palakkad district of Kerala, is accused of hitting the emergency-exit window and attempting to open the door.
Fellow passengers and crew held the man down for the remainder of the descent, and the aircraft touched down without further trouble at Cochin International Airport at roughly 11:30 p.m.
