Earlier this week, a Turkish Airlines Airbus A350 bound for Istanbul made a rapid u-turn and return to Cape Town with an issue onboard.
Discussing The Incident…
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Turkish Airlines flight TK45 is a routine scheduled flight between Cape Town and Istanbul, with the affected rotation being operated by TC-LGK.
As per data from Planespotters.net, TC-LGK is a 2.0 year old Airbus A350-900 that was delivered to the airline back in July 2022.
Of the A350 variant, the airline has 16 of them in the fleet, of which all of them are in active service and has an average fleet age of 2 years.
Turkish Airlines flight TK45 departed Cape Town at 1646 local time on February 19 and proceeded northbound towards Istanbul.
Upon reaching the Citrusdal area, which is to the north of the airport, the aircraft made a sharp u-turn and opted to return back to CPT.
After just 38 minutes in the air, the aircraft was back on the ground in the South African airport.
As per reporting from AirLive, it is understood the cause of this return was due to a passenger having a heart attack onboard the Turkish Airlines Airbus A350 bound for Istanbul from CPT.
The status of the passenger is unclear, and we will not be speculating or adding any information pertinent to that further.
TC-LGK continued on to the Turkish airport around an hour or two after the passenger was offloaded.
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