Private jet blocking Tenerife runway sparks flight diversion nightmare for thousands of passengers
Share:
Exclusive: Passengers from main Canary Island airport to Edinburgh spent the night in Madrid. Thousands of passengers had their flights diverted and delayed after a private jet blocked the runway at the main airport in Tenerife. The plane landed at Reina Sofía airport in the south of the island around 5.45pm on Thursday (2 January). It suffered a technical fault that left it immobilised on the runway. Airport staff took several hours to tow the plane, during which 20 incoming flights were diverted – 13 of them from the UK.
The relatively fortunate passengers – from Birmingham and Manchester on Ryanair and from Norwich on Tui, ended up at Tenerife North airport – an hour away by road from the main southern airport. The rest were spread between Las Palmas, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, flying on to their intended destination once the runway at Tenerife reopened.
Those incoming flights were due to become outgoing flights, taking holidaymakers home from Canary Islands holidays. So there were long delays resulting in some crews going “out of hours”. The first diversion was easyJet flight 3201A from Edinburgh to Las Palmas, which departed Scotland 80 minutes late. Had it been on time, the Airbus jet would have landed ahead of the closure. As it was, the passengers flew to Las Palmas, waited around for a couple of hours and finally reached Tenerife four hours late.
