Originally Posted by
johan rebel
All Flighstats shows is that the flight was canceled officially at 16h25 local time, which is pretty late in the day.
Johan
That's, roughly, the arrival time of the inbound flight - so my guess is that it really
was a technical problem.
My original reaction (i.e., before Johan had posted his reply) was that it could indeed have been a planned cancellation... NWI is one of KLM's maintenance bases, what better way to take an aircraft for routine maintenance than to fly it to its maintenance base with a planeload of passengers? And NWI is a crew base too, so they could have cleverly staffed the flight with an all-local crew and not incurred any hotel expenses...
However, the fact that the decision was made so late would indicate that my initial thoughts were probably wrong. If it had been a planned cancellation then I am sure they would have announced the decision earlier, and made attempts to put the passengers on the last flight out of LCY (1945) - this would have been much cheaper than paying everybody compensation.