A pilot had no choice but to divert a plane around after a brawl broke out between passengers.
One passenger aboard the flight from Agadir to London Stansted on Wednesday said the fight started between two families while they were boarding the aircraft, The Sun reports.
They were less than 40 minutes into the journey, and around 30,000 ft in the air, when the pilot was forced to change destinations, after cabin crew had been able to calm down the warring sides.
The fight itself is understood to have kicked off after a man, reportedly in his late 20s, asked a woman to move so that he could sit with his wife and kids.
The woman, reported to have been sitting beside her daughter, refused, after which the man is then thought to have started threatening her.
Once the seatbelt signs were turned off, the woman’s husband then confronted the man who’d asked her to move.
The pair swiftly came to blows despite the efforts of Ryanair staff to get them to retake their assigned seats.
One person on the flight told the newspaper: ‘They were trying to punch each other. One of the families was part of a larger group so other passengers started to join in.
‘Then a lady in the row behind started to have a panic attack because of everything going on.
‘She was screaming and there were kids crying. It was like a snowball effect.’
They went on: ‘We were only in the air for 36 minutes before we had to do an unexpected landing. It was so stressful.
‘It was like a flight from hell. And it all escalated from that one passenger wanting to change seats.’
Eventually the plane landed in Marrakech, rather than its scheduled destination of Agadir, where Moroccan police boarded to detain nine people who’d been involved in the fight.
In the end, it took more than two hours to get the unruly passengers off the aircraft, by which time the crew had reached the maximum number of hours they were allowed to fly.
As a result, the remaining 200 passengers were boarded onto coaches and taken to a local hotel before being booked onto another flight the following morning.
A spokesperson for the airline said: ‘We sincerely apologise to passengers for this diversion and subsequent delay caused by a small group of disruptive passengers, which was out of Ryanair’s control.’
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