• A flight from Zurich to Washington, DC, returned home after half its bathrooms stopped working.
• The airline found a replacement aircraft, so the 220 passengers were delayed less than 5 hours.
• It's the second time this month that a plumbing problem has caused a flight to nowhere.

A flight from Switzerland to Washington, DC, had to divert after half the plane's bathrooms stopped working due to a plumbing problem.

According to data from Flightradar24, Sunday's Swiss International Air Lines Flight 76 turned around over the English Channel — the arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Britain and France — about an hour into the journey.

The Airbus A330 landed back in Zurich about two and a half hours after taking off from there, becoming a so-called flight to nowhere.

An airline spokesperson told Business Insider there was a blockage in a toilet pipe. This meant all the toilets on the left-hand side of the plane were rendered unusable as they have an interconnected system.

"With 220 passengers on board, continuing the flight was unfortunately not an option," they added.

The airline's dispatch center "immediately organized a replacement aircraft with a new crew," the spokesperson said. This meant the passengers landed in Washington, DC, with a delay of just under five hours.

While flights to nowhere can be frustrating for passengers, this incident shows how returning to a hub airport can provide better solutions than continuing.

It is easier for airlines to reroute passengers, find new crew, and repair any issues at one of their hub airports than if they divert somewhere closer to the destination.

"Such a delay is of course very annoying for our passengers and we would like to apologize again for the inconvenience," the airline spokesperson said.

"In such situations, we do everything we can to get our passengers to their destination as quickly as possible," they added. "This is always our top priority."

This is the second time this month that a flight has turned around due to faulty bathrooms.

An Air India flight returned to Chicago in a nine-hour ordeal after bags, rags, and clothes had been flushed down toilets and clogged the Boeing 777's plumbing.

A crown over a soccer ball. An eyeball that “looked cool.” Flowers.

Those are some of the everyday tattoos that defense lawyers say helped lead to the sudden weekend deportation of roughly 200 Venezuelan men who are accused of being members of the ruthless gang Tren de Aragua.

President Donald Trump ordered the men removed from the U.S. and sent to a notorious El Salvadoran prison under an 18th century wartime law that allows noncitizens to be deported without due process.

The proclamation issued by Trump argued that the wartime law applied because the gang is “perpetrating an invasion” of the United States.

Most lawyers have dismissed that argument and noted that the government has not produced evidence to prove the men are gang members. The men were flown out of the country before they could meet with their attorneys.

Tattoos are signals of membership in some Latin American gangs, with the facial tattoos of the El Salvadoran group MS-13 perhaps the best known. Experts, though, say tattoos are not central to Tren de Aragua. They also note that tattoos, hugely popular all over the world, are often nothing more than body art.

U.S. officials have said agents did not rely on “tattoos alone” to identify gang members before the weekend flights. But lawyers and family members say tattoos were repeatedly used to argue that the men belonged to Tren de Aragua.

Take Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, whose defense lawyer said in a sworn declaration that authorities identified him as a gang member in part because of a tattoo of a crown over a soccer ball and the word “Dios,” or God.

Reyes Barrios, though, had been a professional soccer player and he chose that tattoo because the crown looked like the logo of his favorite team, the Spanish soccer club Real Madrid, his lawyer, Linette Tobin said in the filing.

She included a photo of the tattoo in the filing.

The crown looks very similar to the Real Madrid logo.

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