Passengers on a Cathay Pacific flight from New York City to Hong Kong was stuck on the lane for 34 hours. The plane was forced to have a 15-hour unscheduled layover in Zhuhai, China.

Due to a combination of poor weather, restrictions on how many pilots can work without a break and government policie, 256 passengers on Cathay Pacific Flight CX831 were trapped on the plane for several hours. The plane had left from New York's JFK International Airport during the afternoon on March 29 for a flight to Hong Kong that was only supposed to take 16 hours but  passengers were faced with a much longer ordeal, NBC reports.

As the plane was making its approach into Hong Kong, it was forced to divert to Zhuhai due to a hail and lightning storm. However the passengers and crew weren't allowed to leave the plane once it landed. Chinese leaders in charge of immigration and customs didn't allow the people on the Boeing 777 to leave.

Additionally, the pilots and crew members were supposed to rest as required by law so the airline had to send another crew from Hong Kong to Zhuhai to replace the crew, but Chinese authorities gave the crew a hard time about flying into the city. Instead, they have to take a ferry from Hong Kong to Macau and then had to drive an hour to the airport.

"When I heard about this I immediately felt sympathy for the passengers and the crew," Julie Jarratt, a spokesperson for Cathay Pacific, told NBC. "This was certainly a rare circumstance and one we want to avoid if at all possible."
After a whopping 34 hours, the flight was finally able to continue on to Hong Kong at 1:08 p.m. on March 31. It got to the city in an hour.

"This flight was definitely not a good representation of what Cathay Pacific wants to happen on its flights," Jarratt told NBC.

To make up for the trouble Cathay Pacific gave each passenger about $322.