A Eurowings flight to Mallorca recently took off without any passengers. According to the Saarbrücker Zeitung newspaper, the passengers were already on board before they suddenly had to leave the plane. On August 14, the passengers on flight EW6819 were informed that there would be a delay of several hours due a storm on Mallorca, which made landings impossible.
Palma airport was closed until at least 4pm, it was announced. The crew then allowed passengers to leave the aircraft with their hand luggage. However, a short time later they watched their flight take off without them. A Eurowings spokeswoman explained that the crew had unexpectedly been cleared for take-off to Mallorca.
However, it would have taken too long for the passengers to board again. The airline therefore took the opportunity for several reasons: There were only a few slots for take-offs and landings that day, numerous holidaymakers were waiting on Mallorca for their return flight and the Airbus still had other flights to complete.
If the flight had not taken off some 500 passengers would have been affected. Plus the crew would have exceeded their duty time and a departure would no longer have been possible. In order to maintain the remaining flight programme, Eurowings decided to operate the empty.
The passengers left behind were informed that their flight had been cancelled. They were able to continue their journey from Cologne or Düsseldorf on the following days. Last year, Eurowings was ranked as the second best airline in the world by the air passenger rights portal “Air Help”. The Lufthansa subsidiary was rated particularly highly in terms of punctuality.