A Ryanair plane made an emergency landing in central France after the cabin suddenly depressurized, French officials and the Irish carrier said yesterday. Up to 26 people were hospitalized.
The Boeing 737 was carrying 141 British and 27 Spanish passengers plus six crew members from Bristol, England, to Gerona, Spain, before the urgent landing in Limoges, officials in the Haute-Vienne region said.
The “de-pressurization incident” caused the oxygen masks on board to deploy, a Ryanair statement said.
French officials said 26 people were hospitalized and suffered mostly from chest, nose and ear pain. Ryanair’s statement said 16 people “complaining of ear ache” were taken to hospital.
The French officials said the plane lost 8,000m of altitude in five minutes before the landing, which the pilot requested.
“I think it’s fair to say there was muffled consternation in the first few seconds,” passenger Pen Hadow told Sky News. “People were clearly suffering with the shock of it, but on the whole ... People had a stiff upper lip about it and they were resigned to their fate. They were properly terrified.”
“They thought they were going to meet their maker. And that’s not an exaggeration,” Hadow said.
RyanAir said it brought in a second flight to carry 147 of the passengers to Barcelona’s airport, where it landed early yesterday.
Spain’s airport authority, AENA, said the second flight arrived in Gerona around 4:20am with 125 passengers. AENA declined to comment on Spanish news reports that the rest of the passengers had refused to board the flight and said they would travel to Gerona by road.
Gerona’s airport has recently been closing from midnight to 6am because of construction work, but in this case the airport opened to receive the Ryanair flight, the AENA official said.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
RSS