Way to beat heavy traffic? Errant airliner makes 21-minute flight between two Moscow airports

With Moscow mired in endless pre-holiday gridlocks, many drivers joke it would be easier to fly from one side of the city to another. One air carrier just flew this very journey, in 21-minutes, though passengers weren’t happy.

Passengers on a regional airline were on a flight that included a layover in Moscow, but their plane happened to land at the wrong airport out of the many that serve the Russian capital.

As their previous leg of the journey from the Siberian city of Irkutsk had lasted more than six hours, the passengers on board, over 150 of them, were not happy at arriving so near and yet so far away from the right airport.

The Urals Airlines Airbus A320 touched down in Vnukovo Airport, located west of Moscow, instead of the intended Domodedovo Airport, southeast of the city.

Following a holdback, the carrier told the puzzled passengers that the plane will be refueled, serviced and flown to Domodedovo, in accordance with the planned route, before departing from there to its final destination. The jet was heading for the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals.

The liner took to the skies and needed just 21 minutes to get from one airport to another, according to the data from the FlightRadar 24 website.

One of the passengers posted a photo of a boarding pass with the names of the two of the Russian capital’s airports stamped in it, on his Facebook page. “It’s only really dope guys, who use a plane to travel around Moscow,” he joked sarcastically.

Heading to Yekaterinburg straight from Vnukovo was reportedly impossible as many passengers on board the Airbus had varying types of connecting flights.

Urals Airlines haven’t yet explained the reasons for the confusion. However, it was most likely caused by the weather, as snow and thick fog have been disrupting flights into and out of Moscow for two days now.

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