Worse things can certainly happen, but I have to say I'm glad I wasn't on this flight. A KLM 747 combi turned around six hours into its 12-hour flight to Mexico City, when it was already over the coast of Canada, and flew all the way back to Amsterdam. The reason? Volcanic cloud from Popocatepetl, an active volcano near Mexico City. Apparently, the 28 horses carried as cargo made a diversion to a North American airport impractical:
https://www.traveller.com.au/klm-fli...-around-h1k4uz
Diversions are always inconvenient and often frustrating, but there is something particularly dispiriting about getting off a long flight back where you started (especially when that place is AMS in winter). I'm not sure I buy KLM's excuse: presumably they chose the least expensive and inconvenient of several very expensive and inconvenient options, but if the volcano problem had emerged a couple of hours later into the flight, they would have
had to land somewhere in North America, horses be damned.