A British Airways plane made 2 diversions in a single Transatlantic journey after a medical emergency

• There was a medical emergency on board a British Airways flight from the Bahamas to London.
• The flight was diverted to Canada but soon carried on towards its destination.
• However, it diverted again to Iceland to pick up a new crew due to the original crew timing out.

More than 200 British Airways passengers were delayed by 11 hours after unexpectedly stopping twice on their way home from the Caribbean.

Tuesday's Flight 252 left Nassau in the Bahamas around 10:30 p.m. local time, bound for London.

Four hours later, the Boeing 777 was flying over the North Atlantic when it abruptly turned west toward Canada, according to data from Flightradar24.

It diverted to Gander International Airport in Newfoundland and Labrador, which is usually only home to small regional planes.

A source familiar with the situation told Business Insider that the plane had to divert due to a medical emergency.

After the customer deplaned, the flight took off again less than three hours later, per Flightradar24 data.

However, while the flight was again listed as heading to London Heathrow Airport, it actually flew to Iceland first.

After a roughly three-hour flight, the 28-year-old Boeing 777 landed at Keflavik Airport in the capital, Reykjavík.

It then didn't take off again for more than six hours.

BI understands that due to the first diversion, the flight crew was set to exceed their maximum amount of working hours. So British Airways got creative and arranged for the flight to stop in Iceland — where it was easier to send a replacement crew than it would have been to Canada.

From there, it was another two hours and 20 minutes to the final destination.

The Boeing 777 landed in London around 10:30 p.m. local time on Wednesday. It was initially scheduled to arrive at 11:40 a.m.

It appears that the original pilots and flight attendants had to stay in Iceland overnight before returning to London.

In medical emergencies such as this, pilots typically have no choice but to land at the nearest airport. That's unlike some technical problems when they can return to a hub airport where it's easier to reroute passengers and crew.

Diverting twice is certainly unusual, but it looks like it ultimately saved the passengers time.

Last May, an Air France flight from Paris to Seattle diverted to Canada's Nunavut territory — and had to wait 11 hours for a replacement plane to pick passengers up.

Earlier this month, Virgin Atlantic passengers were delayed 40 hours after a medical emergency forced them to divert to a small airport in Turkey — where the plane then had to undergo technical inspections.