Has anyone claimed when experiencing legal working hours issue?

DayLewis118

Last week we had a 10hour delay with Tui flying direct to Dalaman. When we boarded we were informed a stop in Birmingham was happening to refuel. After arriving in Birmingham, we were then delayed there for 10 hours

The reasons given are shown below in an email the passengers all received from TUI. 

I've attempted to claim 3x but have been rejected all 3x, without specific reasoning, only vague stuff. Based on their own message, surely they can't claim extraordinary circumstances?

silvercar

I would say they can't claim for that. Measuring fuel and staffing levels are both the airlines responsibility. 

eskbanker

Crew going out of hours is a regular reason given by airlines when rejecting compensation claims - it is true (and generally desirable) that, primarily for safety reasons, there are limits to the number of consecutive hours flight crew can work.

Obviously crew rosters are normally configured to account for this, but when significant delays arise, it's usually the maximum hours that are quoted, but of course that's the symptom rather than the actual cause, so in this case it's the technical issue that would seem to be the underlying root cause of the delay.  Technical issues are generally considered to be the airline's responsibility rather than extraordinary circumstances that would absolve responsibility to pay compensation.

Presumably there were two separate technical issues here, one that required the fuel stop, and then another that necessitated replacing the aircraft with another one, so IMHO both of those override the crew hours limitation.

Keep pushing TUI until you get their final response, then escalate to Aviation ADR for independent adjudication:

https://www.aviationadr.org.uk/how-to-complain-about-a-tui-flight/