A View From Middle England - Conservative with a slight libertarian touch - For Christian charity and traditional belief - Free Enterprise NOT Covert Corporatism

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Birmingham Airport plane sit-in by passengers

Stranded at Birmingham Airport - a plane like this one!
Around 100 irate and hungry passengers are refusing to leave a plane that is stuck at Birmingham Airport. The flight was originally scheduled to leave from Manchester for Athens at 13:00 BST, but passengers were then taken by bus to Birmingham. The airline is Viking Hellas, recently rebranded as FlyHellas. It could be Flying Hell for these 100 stranded passengers except they are on the ground.

They had been allowed to board the plane which was due to leave at 17:00, but were then told they would not be taking off and their luggage was removed. A woman passenger, speaking from the aircraft, said police were on board. The woman, who used the name Dorota, said the flight had been chartered and they were originally due to fly on Friday, 21 October.

She said, "People are hungry. They have not eaten since this morning. The air conditioning has been switched off and it is getting hot. The airline will not give us food, only water."

Apparently many of the passengers are due to fly on to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan.

What I find odd is that when the BBC tried to contact both Birmingham Airport and FlyHellas nobody was available for comment. This is the same old story. Corporate ostrich stuff. I would hope that the airport at least would have given an explanation, if only to say they were on the case. Silence is not golden in these cases!

0 comments:

Post a Comment