James Corden was among passengers on board a flight from London to Portugal forced to divert due to a technical fault.
Passengers on board the British Airways plane were reportedly told to assume the brace position ahead of landing, before spending hours stuck on the runway.
The plane left Faro airport in the Algarve on Sunday, but a short way into its journey it is understood to have made an emergency landing in Lisbon.
A woman named only as Vanessa, who was also on the flight, told Metro passengers were at one point told to remove their shoes and “when you’re told to by the airplane staff, please adopt the brace position and when we land if you’re able, please find your nearest emergency exit and vacate the plane”.
“What had happened was the flaps on the airplane wing which are supposed to go down when you are in the air won’t go down, which meant that they wouldn’t be able to raise them on landing,” she told the newspaper.
Passengers were reportedly later told they did not need to adopt the brace position, but are said to have spent three hours on the runway at Lisbon before it was decided the plane was not safe to fly.
Actor and TV host James Corden was reportedly flying in club class on the BA flight.
“He walked up and down the aisles talking to people, and let everybody take a selfie with him,” Vanessa told Metro.
She said he also teased passengers about letting them in on secrets from hit sitcom Gavin & Stacey, which he writes and stars in alongside Ruth Jones.
“I made a joke and went, ‘Oh if we’re all going to die. You could tell us how does the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special end?’ and he went ‘Do you really want to know?’ and I went ‘Yeah.’ He went, ‘I can’t tell you.”’
“Then he said, ‘but do you want to know what happened on the fishing trip?’ and I was like ‘Yes! I do!’ and he was like, ‘I can’t tell you that either.’”
Once passengers were “finally” allowed off the plane, there was reportedly “not a member of BA staff to be found” in the airport and passengers were placed in the wrong queue.
“They put us in immigration queues. And there was just no one there telling us what was going on,” Vanessa told Metro.
Photos showed Corden, best known in the US as the host of talk show The Late Late Show with James Corden, talking to staff at the airport.
Vanessa said he expressed frustrations shared by all on board that the passengers - including families with young children - had been put in the wrong queue.
It was reportedly not until 9.30am on Monday that the passengers were finally given a replacement flight to London, when Corden was “stood in the same queue as everybody else”.
British Airways has been approached by the Standard.
