Originally Posted by patrickw

There might be compensation for pax in Europe under EU261, I doubt airlines would handle differently in similar situations if this was happened in Europe.

Although the home base is less than 3hrs away, getting an aircraft ready for an unexpected flight and call in the whole set of crew takes time, not to mention all the paper work required for an extra flight. By the time they know it would take them 8 hours to fix the aircraft, it might actually take them longer to send in another aircraft for the pax than just try to pack as many pax as possible to those earlier flights and have the unfortunate remaining ones (hopefully not a lot) waiting.