Passengers stranded in Hawaii after an aborted Air New Zealand flight will spend a third night in hotels.
A faulty indication system prompted pilots to cancel flight NZ09 on Sunday (NZT). Two rescheduled departures were cancelled after Air NZ tried to repair the faulty system on the Boeing 767-300 aircraft.
This afternoon the airline announced that a replacement part flown in to fix the fault had ``failed to resolve the engineering issue as expected''.
"Another replacement part is currently en-route to Honolulu where we have engineers standing by to receive and fit it, however, that work is unlikely to be completed until the early hours of tomorrow morning,'' a spokeswoman said.
"To allow our customers to have a night's rest and to arrive in Auckland at a time that still allows connections to domestic and trans-Tasman services we have elected to reschedule the flight from 6pm on Monday local time [4pm on Tuesday NZT] to 7.30am on Tuesday local time [5.30am on Wednesday NZT].''
The rescheduled flight will operate as NZ6889 and is expected to arrive in Auckland at 2pm on Wednesday July 30.
One passenger said disgruntled travellers are requesting the flight be put back, so already "grumpy'' children do not have to leave hotels at 5am local time.
Meanwhile, a number of passengers were earlier placed onto an Hawaiian Airlines flight, which is due to arrive in Auckland later this evening.
It is believed around 90 of the 227 stranded passengers were transferred to this flight.
The original flight NZ09 was aborted during takeoff.
The New Zealand Herald's editor-in-chief Tim Murphy was on board the flight, and tweeted updates about the problems last night.
The take off was aborted "at speed mid-runway", he said, after an indication that the left engine temperature was raised.
"After aborted takeoff, NZ9 Honolulu-Akl now likely cancelled as replacement part to fix engine/indicator light must come from mainland US,'' he posted.
"After 'scouring Honolulu airport for parts' NZ9 is officially cancelled and with crew needing 10 hour break it's back to the beach for all.''
He is understood to be among the passengers transferred to the Hawaiian Airlines flight.
The two day delay has been marked by complaints of a lack of communication from Air NZ to stranded passengers, some complaining they'd had "no updates from anyone''.
In response Air NZ said: "Exercise Rimpac, the world's largest military exercise, is currently taking place in Honolulu. The event attracts 25,000 participants so as you can appreciate the customers were distributed across a number of hotels in order to secure the required number of rooms at short notice. This has made communicating with them challenging.''
