Ryanair fighting eu261 claim

TXPTGR1

Hi ,
Flight from Dublin to PISA delayed for 7 hours 25 th of June
Got no info for delay from Ryanair or Italian regulator so submitted a small claims court claim
Ryanair came back and said they won’t pay as due to extraordinary circumstances.
Should I just give up here or is their response legit.
Response 48 pages with engineers report and other cases (relating to bird strikes though they don’t mention birds in own reports). Gist of it posted below. Would rather not waste my time travelling to Dublin for court date if their reason for not paying is legit.

Said foreign object struck plane on preceding flight , dent was discovered during routine inspection at 4am morning of flight(flight at 7)
Said they contacted Boeing who said plane could fly but damage to be inspected regularly. Ryanair also have own requirements around inspecting damage like this
Due to engineer availability operations knew aircraft would not be serviceable that morning and decided to operate reverse rotation from Dublin which caused the 7 hour delay for our flight.

LeChienMefiant

I won a case previously by proving that they swapped aircraft off a rotation, if it's first flight of the day this would be difficult to prove.

billy few mates

TXPTGR1 wrote: »

Hi ,
Flight from Dublin to PISA delayed for 7 hours 25 th of June
Got no info for delay from Ryanair or Italian regulator so submitted a small claims court claim
Ryanair came back and said they won’t pay as due to extraordinary circumstances.
Should I just give up here or is their response legit.
Response 48 pages with engineers report and other cases (relating to bird strikes though they don’t mention birds in own reports). Gist of it posted below. Would rather not waste my time travelling to Dublin for court date if their reason for not paying is legit.

Said foreign object struck plane on preceding flight , dent was discovered during routine inspection at 4am morning of flight(flight at 7)
Said they contacted Boeing who said plane could fly but damage to be inspected regularly. Ryanair also have own requirements around inspecting damage like this
Due to engineer availability operations knew aircraft would not be serviceable that morning and decided to operate reverse rotation from Dublin which caused the 7 hour delay for our flight.

Absolutely, it's no concern of yours what happened on a previous flight or how they manage the availability of their Engineering cover for situations like this.

LeChienMefiant

In my case the airline made an operational decision to prioritise another route and swap an aircraft out. I won at arbitration. As the above poster touches on, there's no reason that this aircraft was predestined for your routing or that an engineer was unavailable.

billy few mates

LeChienMefiant wrote: »

In my case the airline made an operational decision to prioritise another route and swap an aircraft out. I won at arbitration. As the above poster touches on, there's no reason that this aircraft was predestined for your routing or that an engineer was unavailable.

EU 261 should encourage airlines to ensure they have adequate engineering support at all stations to maintain their published schedule.
The lack of engineering support at an outstation should not absolve them of their obligations under EU 261otherwise it would make far more sense for them to have no planned engineering support at all and treat all unscheduled maintenance as an "extraordinary event". The regulations are in place to ensure airlines have proper resources in place to support the services they sell, unscheduled maintenance is part and parcel of normal airline operations, while you can't plan them you have to plan for them.

LeChienMefiant

DUB also should not be an "out station" for FR.