Airline passengers in Germany forced their plane to be grounded by petitioning the pilot after two aborted take-off attempts.
The Boeing 737-800, a new jet belonging to Air Berlin, was due to fly 172 passengers from Nuremberg in southern Germany to Faro in Portugal on Sunday. But take-off was delayed after the pilot discovered that his cockpit display screen was giving false information about the aircraft’s landing flaps. He returned the plane to the terminal and the passengers disembarked.
The plane was repaired, according to Air Berlin, but shortly before a second take-off attempt, a flight attendant fainted. Passengers interpreted her collapse as a further sign that the aircraft was unsafe.
Reminded of the plane crash after its second take-off attempt in Madrid last month, which killed more than 150 people, passengers refused to board a third time.
Instead, led by Zbigniew and Elisabeth Kaszubski, a Polish couple, they signed a petition demanding a new plane and handed it to the pilot. According to some reports, the strongly worded document threatened that the pilot would be attacked if he tried to take off.
”We were sitting in the aircraft and the plane rolled on to the runway twice, and each time take-off had to be abandoned,” a passenger told the Nürnberger Zeitung newspaper on condition of anonymity. ”Our reaction was understandable.”
Air Berlin heeded the petition and sent for a replacement plane. ”From our point of view, the passengers overreacted,” a spokesperson for the airline said, insisting that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft.
After a 15-hour wait all but two of the passengers who refused to fly in the original plane were taken to Faro in a replacement jet from Turkey. — guardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008