Irate passengers beat Medview staff over flight delay, cancellations

• Seek NCAA’s intervention
• Airline blames weather

This seems not to be the best of time for Medview passengers in London, Dubai and Lagos as irate travellers who were not able to travel to their various destinations have vented their anger on the airline workers by assaulting them.

In Lagos, hundreds of passengers of the airline yesterday attacked officials of Med-View Airline over the cancellation of their flights out of the country.

Not satisfied with taking the law into their hands, the aggrieved travellers protested to  NCAA Consumer Protection Department desk to complain about the seeming abandonment.

The passengers who were supposed to be airlifted to Gatwick International Airport in London and Dubai complained that they had been abandoned since last Sunday, December 24, 2017 by the airline.

The protesting passengers took over the airline’s check-in counter at the international wing of the airport, disrupting its activities and accused the airline of breach of contractual agreement.

Some of the aggrieved passengers protested to the table of the Consumer Protection Directorate (CPD) of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) at the international airport, complaining that they had been abandoned by the airline.

The London-bound passengers who spoke to Woleshadare.net alleged that they ought to have been flown out of the country to London since December 24, 2017, but had been stranded in the country without any concrete travel plan from the airline.

Dubai passengers also joined the fray as some of them said they had a flight for which they could not ascertain whether or not it would fly especially as there were passengers from Monday’s Dubai flight out of the country that were equally stranded.

The airline had on December 24, 2017 blamed its inability to airlift some of its passengers on adverse weather and technical issues.

One of the affected passengers who spoke to our correspondent said: “I don’t know when the cancelled flight of December 24th has been scheduled. I haven’t received any update, no emails, no text messages either.

“We have not received any updates or confirmation from the company Med-view. Only words of mouth from equally stressed passengers saying there will be a flight, but this is not official from the airline and so is uncertain.”

Another passenger said: “This is a joke. I have been waiting from December 25, Customer Service said I should come to the airport on the 27th that they have three planes going on that day and to come early, but they haven’t sent any confirmation.”

As at 12:30pm, London-bound passengers got reprieve when an airline official appeared with a list for those travelling as they were being endorsed to fly on Ethiopian Airlines, Kenyan Airways and RwandAir.

While a Dubai passenger provided a text message sent from Med-view that the flight had been rescheduled to 2am on the 29th due to operational reasons and regretted all the inconveniences.

The airline is yet to speak on the matter as at the time of filing this report.

Wole Shadare