Inaugural flights are supposed to be memorable, but not for this reason (thanks to BlueTail for flagging this)…
SAS inaugural flight ends up being 8+ hour flight to nowhere
On Tuesday, June 2, 2026, Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) was supposed to operate its inaugural flight between Copenhagen, Denmark (CPH), and Mumbai, India (BOM). This was SAS’ first flight to India in roughly 17 years, so there was a lot of buzz surrounding this flight.
Flight SK969 was scheduled to depart at 4:10PM and land at 4:30AM the following morning, using an Airbus A330-300 with the registration code LN-RKM. However, that’s not exactly how things played out.
First, the plane only took off at 8:23PM, roughly four hours behind schedule. For well over four hours, it made its way southeast, flying over Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Black Sea, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. However, at that point the plane turned around, to head back toward its origin.
After a journey of well over eight hours, the plane touched down in Copenhagen at 4:35AM the following morning. So yeah, the flight time was roughly as expected, but the plane ended up at its origin rather than its destination.
This plane turned around due to lack of regulatory approvals
Typically when you see these kinds of “return to origin” situations, it’s due to some maintenance issue that doesn’t pose a risk to the flight, but where the airline has decided that there’s value in having the plane back at base, so that an issue can be addressed, rather than having a plane stranded at an outstation.
Meanwhile if you have some sort of a medical or safety issue, you’d typically divert to a nearby airport, rather than flying the same distance as what’s remaining to your destination.
So what happened here? As it turns out, the airline hadn’t received its final regulatory approval to operate this route. According to the company, it was awaiting final regulatory approval from Indian authorities, and expected that would come through while inflight.
However, that didn’t end up happening. So when the plane reached roughly the halfway point, the decision was made to return to Copenhagen, to avoid a diversion to some third country destination, where passengers could potentially be stranded.
In the meantime, the airline has also canceled its June 4 and June 5 flights to Mumbai, so clearly this regulatory approval issue was at least days from being resolved, rather than being minutes or hours from being resolved.
The airline has issued the following statement about what happened:
SAS completed all necessary operational and regulatory preparations for the launch following several months of planning and co-ordination. Based on ongoing discussions with the relevant authorities, SAS had every expectation that the remaining formal approval would be finalised while the flight was en route. As the approval was not finalised as anticipated, the flight could not continue as planned.
Our immediate focus is on supporting affected passengers and securing the remaining approval is obtained in order to commence service as soon as possible. We remain ready to commence operations and expect the service to begin within the next couple of days once the formal approval has been issued.
Suffice it to say that this is a very rough situation, and the optics of this for an inaugural are especially bad. Now, it’s anyone’s guess exactly which approvals were missing, and whether the airline was just being unrealistic with its hopes, or what.
While stuff like this is extremely rare, it does happen. In March of this year, an Air India flight to Canada had to turn around while inflight, as Air India operated the flight with a plane that it didn’t technically have permission to fly to Canada. Meanwhile last June, American flew the wrong type of plane to Italy, also causing a diversion.
Aviation is incredibly complex, and under normal circumstances, airlines do a great job managing all the logistics. This is obviously one of those situations where something slipped through the cracks. You’ll always see new airline announcements reference how a route is subject to government approval, and I guess this is one of those situations where that factor came into play. 😉
Bottom line
SAS was supposed to return to India, with a nonstop Copenhagen to Mumbai flight. The plane took off as scheduled on June 2, but the regulatory approval that the airline was expecting to come through during the flight didn’t actually come. Therefore the decision was made to return to Denmark, leading to an over eight hour flight to nowhere.
This is obviously super rough, though stuff like this does happen every so often.
What do you make of this SAS inaugural snafu?