Fed-up passenger gets out and sits on wing
madrid — A passenger on a delayed Ryanair flight from London who apparently got fed up waiting to get off a plane after it landed in the southern Spanish city of Malaga surprised fellow passengers by using the emergency exit to jump onto a wing.
The incident on New Year’s Day took place 30 minutes after the flight from Stansted Airport landed.
The man, who has not been named but is said to be a non-Spanish citizen, was coaxed back onto the plane while police were called.
Fellow passenger Fernando del Valle Villalobos, who videoed the incident, said he heard the man say he got fed up waiting.
“I was astonished,” del Valle, 25, said in a telephone interview.
He said the passengers were standing in the aisle waiting to get off the plane when the man “very calmly asked permission to get past, opened the emergency exit, looked out, saw the wing, went back for his back-pack.”
“We had been waiting around half-an-hour to get out of the plane,” Fernando del Valle, another passenger, said of the incident on Monday evening.
“The man calmly went to the emergency exit, pulled the mechanism to open the door, looked out, came back to get his backpack and went out on the wing.”
Del Valle filmed the incident and posted it on his Facebook page. His footage reveals a man walking on the wing, putting his backpack down and sitting next to the bag.
“The captain was stunned... he asked who had got out on the wing,” said del Valle, a Spaniard who was coming back from London on the flight which left an hour late but arrived around 20 minutes after the planned time late on Monday.
The man, whose age and identity have not been revealed, was immediately arrested, Ryanair said in a statement.
A spokesman for Spain’s Guardia Civil police force, meanwhile, said the captain had asked them to intervene, adding they had reported the passenger to air safety authorities. — AP, AFP