Turbulence on Ryanair flight, the account of an Italian passenger: 'Bad emergency management and lack of transparency'

Meanwhile, in the aeroplane bathroom, a passenger was changing her child's nappy. She was injured in the fall, there was blood in the toilet and on the cabin crew. Two stewardesses, who were in the rear compartment next to the trolleys, were also thrown and hit hard. "One of them told us that even the pilots in the cabin had hit their heads. Nobody knew what was happening. No announcement from the captain, no communication from Ryanair. The turbulence came without warning and no one, despite the goodwill and undoubted professionalism of the flight attendants, seemed prepared to handle it'.

The flight was forced to make an emergency landing. But not in Munich, as the passengers initially thought. "We only found out by turning on the GPS: we had ended up in Memmingen, a small airport in southern Germany. Nobody had told us anything, we thought, from the rumours that had spread among us passengers, that we were in Munich. There was no announcement from the loudspeakers, no communication from the cabin. After disembarking, the fire brigade and the police came up. Some passengers were in shock'.

Around 10 p.m. a restart was promised shortly. But the hours passed without any definite information.

"At midnight we were still there, with the children, in a completely closed airport. Ryanair sent us four euro vouchers to eat, but all the bars were now closed. Only the first arrivals got some leftovers, the others nothing. At one point some passengers started taking snacks from a closed kiosk. The police arrived, but they let it go as they understood the situation of chaos'.

Around 1.30 a.m., word spread among the passengers that the journey would continue by bus to Milan Malpensa. The first bus did not arrive until an hour later. It was only once on board, while checking their boarding passes, that many discovered the existence of a replacement flight Memmingen-Malpensa scheduled for the following morning. But no one had informed them about the possibility of staying in the hotel and departing quietly the next day.

"They let families with children on board first,' Andrea recounts. We left at two in the morning and arrived at Malpensa around seven. Nobody offered us the option of staying overnight in the hotel and leaving the next day by plane. I only found out by checking my boarding pass, already on board the bus, that my flight had been rescheduled for 7.15am the next morning. But nobody told us, this option for us was never real. Evidently, it was cheaper for the company to organise three buses to Malpensa than to cover the cost of a night in a hotel for 179 passengers'.