Air Asia X, the long haul affiliate of the the Air Asia Group, returned to its origin after the auto-thurts on the Airbus a330 failed. Flight D7172 was about 45 minutes into its 10 hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to Jeddah when the system failed. This wasn’t considered an emergency as the pilots could manually control the throttle, but the plane turned back because the flight to Jeddah is a long one.

The a330 then flew circles over the Strait of Malacca for four hours to burn of fuel so they could be light enough to land. They couldn’t  dump the fuel as Air Asia X doesn’t have the model of a330 that had the fuel dumping option.

Flight tracking service FlightRadar24 tweeted out when the flight was circling:

AirAsiaX #D7172 has been burning fuel for 4 hours to reduce weight & return to Kuala Lumpur http://t.co/8su11KHZmu pic.twitter.com/yTBZlAo1Ni

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) February 8, 2015

If more information comes out on this event, @Fandagear will post any article updates.

You can also read our coverage of the recovery of Air Asia QZ8501 here: Air Asia QZ8501 Crash