Ryanair Furious After Berlin Airport Refuses Landing Over 7-Minute Delay
- Ryanair has hit out at the control authority of Berlin Airport after a flight from Vilnius fell foul of the airport's strict night time curfew. Passengers had to endure a three hour coach ride in the middle of the night after the plane was diverted to Hannover.
The low-cost airline Ryanair has lashed out at the official body that controls Berlin Brandenburg Airport after it refused permission for a Ryanair flight to land, prompting an unscheduled diversion to Hannover, just because the plane was a mere seven minutes late.
After landing in Hannover, the passengers then had to get on a coach in the middle of the night and drive for three hours until they finally reached their intended destination in the German capital.
The head-scratching incident occurred on Wednesday night when the pilots of Ryanair flight FR-1471 from Vilnius, Lithuania, had to reroute the Boeing 737-800 with as many as 189 passengers onboard due to bad weather on their planned flight path.
That short reroute, however, meant that the plane would land at Berlin Brandenburg Airport after a strict night curfew. Ryanair says it requested an exception be made for Flight 1471, but the control authority refused.
As a result, the plane had to continue flying for a further 161 miles (259.5 kilometers) to Hannover, where the plane landed safely.
Berlin Brandenburg Airport is controlled by the Joint Higher Aviation Authority, which is known locally as LuBB. In accordance with federal court rulings, LuBB has imposed night-time flying restrictions at the airport in order to protect local residents living close to the airport from aircraft noise.
In its simplest form, the regulations ban any aircraft from taking off or landing at Berlin Brandenburg between 11:30 pm and 5:30 am, although there are some exceptions.
For example, landings are allowed during these hours if it’s due to an emergency situation or for a VIP government visitor, as well as police and other official purposes.
The regulations also allow officials to grant a 30-minute extension for late arrivals up to midnight, although there is no option to extend this any further.
In the case of Ryanair flight 1471, the plane was already delayed leaving Vilnius by more than an hour and a half on Wednesday night. According to data supplied by Flight Radar 24, the plane departed Vilnius at 11:52 pm (one hour ahead of Germany) for the approximately one-and-a-quarter-hour flight to Berlin.
Ryanair flight 1471 was originally scheduled to land in Berlin at 10:50 pm, but the delay meant that the plane would have arrived after midnight, which is beyond the standard extension time permitted by LuBB’s noise control regulations.
“It is completely unacceptable that passengers are being subjected to unnecessary inconvenience due to LuBB’s refusal to grant even minor exemptions to the night flight ban,” slammed Ryanair’s head of communications in Germany, Marcel Pouchain Meyer.
“It makes no sense for aircraft to be repeatedly diverted from Berlin Airport just a few minutes after the start of the night flight ban and forced to fly to Hanover, where passengers then have to take a three-hour bus journey back to Berlin,” Meyer continued.
“It would be much more sensible and also more environmentally friendly to grant the airlines adequate flexibility to be allowed to land in Berlin to a reasonable extent after the start of the night flight ban.”
Matt’s take – Should Ryanair Flight 1471 have departed in the first place?
It could be argued that after encountering a pretty significant delay on the ground, the airline would have been aware that Flight 1471 would be cutting it really fine to reach Berlin before the full night-time curfew took effect.
As a flight attendant, I’ve been working on delayed flights where we have been forced to cancel at the last minute because of nighttime curfews. Some airports are more willing to offer extensions than others, and Berlin is famous for enforcing its regulations very strictly.
In cases like this, it’s incredibly inconvenient for both passengers and the airlines, but perhaps the diversion to Hannover and a three-hour coach ride to Berlin was better than stranding passengers in Vilinus overnight and reaching Berlin even later.
What do you think? Should Berlin Airport have made an exception for this flight? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below…
IMO, this is 100% on FR. They cram in as many flights as possible into a day. Delays in the evening are fairly common (although FR1571 has above-average OTP statistics among Ryanair’s routes).
They accept that business risk. They should handle it properly when things go wrong instead of deflecting from their super-tight schedules and shoestring budgets by bitching and moaning.
It is an all-to-common strategy. Apparently, it works as you as a blogger are picking it up without remarking that these loud complaints are tactical/strategic in nature.