A passenger who claimed she was injured after a Ryanair aircraft struck the runway on takeoff at Dublin Airport, lost a claim for damages for physical and psychological injury against the airline yesterday.
Peter O'Brien, for Ryanair, told the Circuit Civil Court that under the Warsaw and Montreal Convention, Róisín Hartshorn, a programme manager, was not entitled to damages for psychological harm unless she could relate it to a physical injury. Mr O'Brien said the first time Ms Hartshorn had complained of a psychological injury being triggered by pain in her right foot was in September last, four years after the incident.
Exaggerated
Judge Jacqueline Linnane said she accepted Mr O'Brien's submission that Ms Hartshorn had exaggerated the injury to her right foot. Dismissing her claim and awarding costs to Ryanair, Judge Linnane said: "I do not accept any problems she may have regarding her foot triggers any anxiety or panic attacks. I also do not accept any anxiety attack or fear of flying flows from or is caused by flareups of her foot injury."
The judge said that although Ms Hartshorn had told the court she had stopped using Ryanair because she had no confidence in them, the airline’s records revealed she had flown with the company on 26 occasions between 2008 and 2011.
Ms Hartshorn, (31) of Coolawinna Park, Ashford, Co Wicklow, and now living in London, told the court she was on a Ryanair flight to London in 2008 when the tail struck the runway.
The oxygen masks had fallen but not the ones above her . She felt a tightness in her chest. A male passenger released her oxygen mask by hitting it a thump. Before that she and a friend had been sharing a mask.