A disabled woman successfully sued Ryanair yesterday after her husband was forced to carry her onto a flight using a fireman’s lift. Wheelchair-bound Jo Heath, 57, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, was left sitting beside the plane after a hydraulic lift failed to turn up for 30 minutes. She and her husband asked the crew and pilot for help but they refused in case they hurt themselves. In the end, Mr Heath had to sling his ten stone wife over his shoulder and clamber up the stairs on his own as ground staff, crew members and passengers looked on, shame on them.
Mrs Heath has now won £1,750 compensation for the humiliation she suffered after Ryanair breached its contract by failing to provide the assistance she had ordered and contravening disability discrimination laws. In a damning verdict on the budget airline, a judge said all it ‘was interested in was getting the plane airborne in time’. It is true to say that Ryanair staff could not help incase the passenger was not, not them. This has as much to do with mad EU rights laws as it has with Ryanair management.