An air rage incident aboard a Tui flight from Montego Bay in Jamaica to Manchester has left 340 passengers stranded for days in Nassau.
The Boeing 787 operating flight TOM 115 took off from Montego Bay at 5.20pm on Sunday for what was expected to be an eight-hour, 4,616-mile flight to Manchester. Soon after departure, as the plane crossed Cuban airspace, cabin crew alerted the pilots to a disruptive passenger.
The captain decided to divert to Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, to remove the individual. The seven-year-old jet flew several circuits north of Nassau to dump many tonnes of fuel into the Atlantic, in order to reduce the weight to a safe level for landing. The plane touched down at the Bahamian capital about two hours after take-off from Montego Bay.
Initially the expectation was that the disruptive passenger would be removed, the aircraft would refuel and the flight would continue with a few hours’ delay.
But during the evening it emerged that a component involved in discharging the tanks had been damaged during the dumping of fuel. The aircraft, crew and passengers would have to overnight in Nassau – a location where Tui has no staff.
“By the time we got the suitcases, messed about with immigration because the airport was shut and they had to bring people in, and got to the hotel it was 3am,” said passenger Emma Louise Hamer in a Facebook post.
“Some people didn’t check into their rooms until half-past six, seven o’clock [in the morning],” she said. In the post she also criticised the quality of accommodation, which she described as “hotels that, really, I wouldn’t even put my dogs in”.
When an airline diverts to an airport where it has no representation, it is reliant on local ground handling agents to provide care.
Ms Hamer said the passengers were told they had to leave their rooms at 11am on Monday, and then sat at the airport until 8.30pm – when they learnt their flight had been cancelled.
“This is getting really scary now,” she said in the Facebook post from Nassau airport. “You’re going to have a full-scale riot. Security are coming in to arrest people because people are kicking off. All they want is for Tui to come here and tell us what’s going on.
“You’ve got a lot of very, very, very angry customers here.”
The required new component was dispatched from London Heathrow on a scheduled British Airways flight on Tuesday, which is due to arrive at around 2.20pm, local time. If there is no hold-up with clearing the new part through customs or fitting it, the flight is likely to depart around 6pm for the 4,253-mile flight to Manchester – arriving on Wednesday morning, about 48 hours late.
Tui has told The Independent all passengers will be emailed to advise them to claim £520 each in compensation under air passengers’ rights rules. In addition, they will get £100 vouchers for a future Tui holiday.
Once the cost of compensation, passenger care and dumped fuel are taken into account, Tui is likely to have lost at least £300,000 as a result of the incident.
Airlines are increasingly seeking to recover costs involved in air-rage diversions from the passenger responsible. In January, Ryanair launched an action claiming £12,500 from a passenger flying from Dublin to Lanzarote whose behaviour triggered a diversion to Porto in Portugal.
Read more: Are air passengers’ rights fit for purpose?
