A sudden loss of cabin pressure and an emergency landing has sent 33 Ryanair passengers to hospital, with some of those on the flight bleeding from the ears and nose and many thinking they were going to die – only to finish up sleeping on a concrete airport floor.
Oxygen masks descended aboard the Irish low-cost carrier’s flight FR7312 from Dublin to Zadar in Croatia. Ryanair said: “In line with standard procedure, the crew deployed oxygen masks and initiated a controlled descent.”
The flight, operated with a Boeing 737-800, diverted to Frankfurt Hahn airport, descending from 37,000 to 10,000 feet in seven minutes, Flightradar24.com shows.
Although Ryanair said the plane “landed normally and customers disembarked, where a small number received medical attention as a precaution” – passenger reaction ranged from shock to fury.
Spanish journalist and language teacher Minerva Galvan Domenech told news website Spiegel Online that passengers had to wait 45 minutes before being let off the plane. German police said 33 of 189 passengers were hospitalised, some bleeding from their ears. There were no serious injuries; all were discharged from hospital by Saturday morning (local time).
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Passengers slammed the way the airline had dealt with them. They used terms like “disgraceful” and “bordering on inhumane”.
One woman told the Irish Times the plane was in darkness for 15 minutes, with oxygen masks deployed and “no reassurance, just people shouting ‘emergency, emergency’.
“There was a newborn baby and children on the flight, people are screaming and we don’t know what’s going on for 15 minutes… Then finally we’re told that we’re going to Germany.”
A 21-year-old man told the paper: “They really displayed a shocking lack of empathy for their customers, almost bordering on inhumane.”
A woman passenger said that after arrival at Frankfurt-Hahn airport she had been “on a cold hard floor for 11 hours now, all I’ve got to eat is a croissant and a coffee to the value of the EUR 10 voucher we were given”. She added that she was told she would have to use her own money to buy anything else.
Ryanair said: “Customers were provided with refreshment vouchers and hotel accommodation was authorised, however there was a shortage of available accommodation. Customers will board a replacement aircraft which will depart to Zadar this morning and Ryanair sincerely apologises for any inconvenience.”
The airport that the flight diverted to, Frankfurt-Hahn, is used mainly for cargo flights. It charges airlines less than Frankfurt Airport but the only commercial passenger airlines that use it are low-cost carriers Ryanair, Sun Express (a joint venture of Lufthansa and Turkish Airlines) and Hungary’s Wizzair. The latter was recently in hot water after its cabin crew were said to have carried a 63-year-old Polish drunk onto a flight to Glasgow. See: Cabin crew ‘carried vodka-swigging drunk onto flight’
Back to the Ryanair incident,the Aviation Herald says the replacement Ryanair B737-800 reached Zadar the following day with a delay of about 13 hours.
Negative publicity over the weekend’s emergency diversion comes at a bad time for Ryanair. Its pilots had already set two strikes for this Friday and the following Tuesday, 20 and 24 July, over work-related matters. A walkout last Thursday led to the cancellation of 30 Ryanair flights, disrupting travel for about 5000 passengers.
The airline’s cabin and ground crew from Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium plan to stage walkouts on 25 and 26 July, saying Ryanair has failed to address a list of demands.
Written by Peter Needham
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