Warning Light Disrupts Flight

A JetBlue airliner circled above the ocean for more than two hours and then returned to Long Beach Municipal Airport early Saturday after a warning light erroneously indicated a problem with the landing gear.

The warning light came on shortly after New York-bound Flight 216 took off from Long Beach about 10 p.m. Friday, a JetBlue spokeswoman said.

The captain reset the system and the light went off, spokeswoman Jenny Dervin said, but he decided to burn enough fuel to land in Long Beach and have the problem checked out in the interest of safety.

The Airbus 320 had 146 passengers and six crew members aboard.

Inspection of the plane indicated nothing wrong, but it remained on the ground Saturday and will undergo further examination, Dervin said.

The aircraft is the same model as another JetBlue plane that made an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport in September when its nose landing gear locked askew on takeoff from Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport.

The airline offered the Long Beach passengers overnight accommodations at nearby hotels and resumed the flight about 8 a.m. Saturday using another plane, Dervin said.

Late last month, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of 200 Airbus planes in response to the Sept. 21 incident, in which JetBlue Flight 292 made an emergency landing with its nose wheel stuck down and sideways.

No one was hurt in what aviation experts hailed as a highly skillful landing. Passengers broke into applause when the aircraft stopped and praised the crew as they filed off the plane.

The nearly three-hour ordeal as the plane burned off fuel before attempting the landing was broadcast live and watched by many passengers on the plane’s in-flight television system.

JetBlue subsequently performed landing-gear inspections of its aircraft, Dervin said.

“This was just a faulty indicator light,” she said of Saturday’s incident, not a problem with the landing gear itself.