Oops: Brussels Airlines’ Nine Hour Flight To Nowhere

Brussels Airlines’ flight from Brussels to Washington (SN515) is usually in the air for about 8-8.5 hours, at least based on looking at flight tracking for the past couple of weeks. Yesterday the flight was in the air for around nine hours… and it landed back in Brussels.

That’s right, Brussels Airlines operated a roughly nine hour flight from Brussels to Brussels, as the plane turned around halfway over the Atlantic. The plane took off at 12:30PM, and landed back in Brussels at 9:15PM

The flight was supposed to be operated with an A330-200 that had the registration code OO-SFZ, but it got swapped last minute for operational reasons. The plane was then operated by an A330-300 that had the registration code OO-SFL.
There are some interesting things about this plane:

• It flew for Lufthansa until March 2019
• Then it was transferred to Brussels Airlines, and it began flying for them as of May 18, 2019
• While the plane is flown by Brussels Airlines, it’s technically registered to Eurowings, given that it has an “OO” registration code
• This is part of Brussels Airlines being integrated into Eurowings, which is their low cost carrier
• This was the plane’s first flight to the US since it was re-registered as a Brussels Airlines/Eurowings plane