EasyJet A319 Heads Back to London After Rimini Glitch

Trouble Thirty Minutes Out

An easyJet flight bound for London Gatwick ended right where it began last week after a cockpit alert forced a sudden about-face. Flight U28378 had barely settled into its climb out of Rimini when the pilots hit trouble. Just thirty minutes after takeoff, the crew flying the Airbus A319-111 (registration G-EZAN) flagged a technical issue and made the call to head straight back to the Italian runway. If you were sitting in 14E, watching that Adriatic shoreline swing back into view wasn't part of the plan, though the touchdown itself went off cleanly.

A 24-Hour Timeout on the Tarmac

Down on the Rimini apron, maintenance teams had a problem to solve. Peak summer is the worst possible moment for an airliner to sit idle, and the pressure was on to figure out what went wrong. Passengers were taken care of while the crew worked through the logbooks, though the disruption wrecked travel schedules for everyone on board. Whatever the glitch was, isolating it took the better part of a day. The twin-jet ended up parked overnight, catching the eye of flight trackers watching the British-registered airframe take an unscheduled Italian holiday.

The Empty Run Back to Gatwick

By the evening of August 20, engineers finally signed off on the fix and cleared the grounded Airbus to fly. Spooling up its twin CFM56 engines, the jet departed Rimini for a quiet, passenger-free ferry flight home under callsign EZY9004. The hop back to Gatwick went without a hitch, and the aircraft is already back in regular passenger rotation. Still, that thirty-minute flight to nowhere—and the day-long timeout that followed—proved once again that when something feels off in the cockpit, you don't take chances.