A British accountant has described ‘fearing for her life’ when she claims she was ‘trapped’ on a grounded Ryanair flight ‘with broken air conditioning’ and fainted in an asthma attack.
Charlaine Seaward says she was returning from a girls’ holiday in Tenerife, Spain, on January 14 when she unknowingly boarded a plane unable to take off allegedly due to an air conditioning fault.
The 24-year-old from Caerphilly, Wales claims that after around 45 minutes cooped-up in the cabin the stuffy air caused her to hyperventilate and have an asthma attack.
Her Inhaler Stopped Working
When her inhaler stopped working she says she asked staff if she could leave the aircraft to get some fresh air but was told to stay on due to health and safety reasons and offered her an oxygen tank to use instead.
Charlaine, who ‘genuinely believed she was going to die’ when the attack was at its worst, says she passed out in a seat at the front of the plane, only to wake up while receiving treatment from medics.
Now She Wants Compensation
Ryanair say they recognise the plane was held up by a small technical fault and have refunded Charlaine £50 – but she says she would like compensation for the terrifying experience on the grounded aircraft.
The airline said the crew offered to disembark Charlaine after the attack and that she was not trapped on the aircraft but ‘chose’ to stay on the flight ‘after receiving medics’ clearance to do so’.
After the experience, Charlaine posted an angry rant on Facebook to warn travellers never to fly with the budget airline and claimed other panicked passengers ‘feared for their lives’ in the conditions too.
But The Airline Thinks Otherwise
The airline claimed that as medics declared her fit to fly and she took the flight, Charlaine is not entitled to a refund but she is entitled to 261 euros (£223) for the delay – though she claims she’s only received £50.
Charlaine said: ‘We were on the plane for around 45 minutes before I started hyperventilating and getting really flustered.
‘I realised it was getting hot in there but nobody seemed to know why we were waiting.
‘When I asked, they told me there’s no air con so I said “I can tell. It’s really warm, can I step off the plane for a minute?”.
‘I told them I was struggling to breathe and my inhaler had stopped working. By this point I’d taken nine pumps of my inhaler.
‘I started really freaking out and then my breathing got so much worse so they sat me at the front of the plane.
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How She Was Told to Stay on The Plane
‘They told me they couldn’t take me off the plane because it was a health and safety hazard but being on the plane was a health and safety hazard too.
‘It was hurting my chest to breathe and I think that’s when I passed out because I stopped myself from breathing.
‘I don’t remember much after that because I woke up with an oxygen mask on my face and by that point we were around two hours delayed.
Charlaine says she insisted she’d stay on the flight because she had work the next day, didn’t have anywhere to stay and would have had to claim on her insurance.
She says she was told to use the oxygen tank throughout the flight, which she did, but thankfully the air conditioning was fixed prior to take off.
Charlaine, who started getting asthma symptoms around five years ago, claims she applied for a flight refund the following day.
However, she says she was surprised to see her claim rejected as they had no record of her being on the flight.
