A group of Irish holidaymakers were left stranded after they were unable to board their Ryanair flight from Fuerteventura to Dublin on Thursday morning. The group of 38 passengers were diverted to other airports and some are still waiting to get home.
The reason for them being left behind was that one of the cabin crew on board had taken ill and as a result, there were not enough crew members to cover a full flight.
The captain announced that 38 people would have to volunteer to stay behind but that ended up being most of the people who were still waiting on the tarmac. In the end, they hadn’t actually volunteered.
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One couple did put their hands up when they saw that a family with two children with special needs were about to be separated. Paul and Rita decided to give up their seats so the family could travel together.
“I don’t think it was even noble, it was just the right thing to do,” Paul told RTE’s Joe Duffy on Liveline on Friday. The captain thanked them at the time and assured them that Ryanair would take care of them, Paul said.
After the flight took off, the 38 people who remained were split into groups. One group of, including Paul and Rita, was sent to Edinburgh, another was ferried to Lanzarote to wait for a flight to Barcelona.
While calling into the show, Paul and Rita were still stranded in Edinburgh airport waiting for a flight back to Dublin.
“We all got to Edinburgh assuming everything would be grand,” Paul to the radio host. But the Ryanair area at the airport had no airline staff for them to talk to, only electronic services.
Edinburgh airport staff apparently had no idea what was going on with the wayward passengers when they arrived. One staff member reportedly said they had never seen this happen before.
“I actually had no idea what was happening,” said Rachel Gorry, who was also diverted to Edinburgh. “It was very stressful.”
Eventually Rachel, who was with her cousin Ruby (12), got a flight from Glasgow to Dublin, which cost her grandfather about €500. In a positive twist though, Rachel’s boss rang into the show to tell her she didn't have to come into work on Monday.
“None of us have heard a thing from Ryanair,” said Collette Woods, who was part of the group of 38 left on the runway. Everyone who called into the show said something similar.
Meanwhile, a group of nine people is still in The Canaries, on Lanzarote, where they are waiting for a flight to Barcelona and then another to Dublin.
Stephen Daly is one of them and he told Joe Duffy that when they got off the ferry from Fuerteventura, the taxis they had been promised were not there to pick them up. He was also concerned that Ryanair would only pay for one night’s accommodation there and not for the hotel in Barcelona.
Towards the end of the segment, Ryanair did publish a statement saying that the inconvenienced passengers could claim their expenses on the airline’s website.
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