Ryanair has introduced new safety procedures after a child fell onto the tarmac from the top of a passenger staircase while boarding a plane at Stansted airport.
The three-year-old girl, Olga, escaped with only minor injuries after falling through the gap in the handrail at the top of the Boeing 737’s boarding steps in July 2009.
A report into the incident by Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said the child had climbed the stairs unassisted as her mother, journalist Sasha Slater, was carrying her 18-month-old son, Joe, with one hand and luggage with the other.
When Olga reached the top of the stairs, “she turned towards her mother, leaned backwards and fell through the gap between the extendable handrail and the top of the airstairs,” the AAIB report said.
After receiving initial medical assistance, Olga was airlifted to hospital and was released 24 hours later.
The AAIB report concluded that the gap between the extendable handrail and the upper platform of the Boeing 737 airstairs represented “a hazard to small children boarding or disembarking the aircraft”.
The AAIB recommended that Ryanair review its current passenger boarding and disembarkation procedures “so that assistance is made available to passengers accompanied by children and those with special needs”.
In response, the airline today issued a brief statement stating it had reviewed its procedures as recommended by the AAIB and introduced new safety measures for boarding and disembarking aircraft.
“New procedures including new high visibility tensa barriers, and specific announcements to passengers travelling with young children on both boarding and disembarkation have also been introduced in order to eliminate any recurrence of these extremely rare events in the context of over one million Ryanair flights over the past two years,” spokesman Daniel de Carvalho said.
In its report, the AAIB said there had been four previously-reported similar incidents involving small children and this led to American aviation authorities issuing a special airworthiness information bulletin; the amendment of the Boeing 737 flight attendant manual and the release of two special safety bulletins.
The AAIB said it was making the safety recommendation to Boeing about the airstairs design as the special bulletins “do not provide physical protection against a child falling through the gap”.
Also, the AAIB said modification proposed by Ryanair after last summer’s incident provided “only a limited physical protection against falling”.
In May this year, Ms Slater wrote about the incident in the London Evening Standard .She described how Olga "suddenly screamed and slid off the side of the platform", landing on her side on the tarmac.
Ms Slater went on: “I thrust Joe into the arms of an air hostess and ran down to reach my daughter who was lying, screaming, beneath the plane. I was forcibly prevented from holding her by one of the many doctors on the flight in case she’d broken her back.
“The next few hours passed in a blur of paramedics, sedatives, stretchers, helicopters and ambulances, brain scans and X-rays. But a day later she was running around in hospital, the only visible signs of injury some scuffing on her toes and knees, a sore neck, and an egg on her forehead.”
In June, an airline passenger suffered a serious leg injury after the mobile stairs used to disembark a Ryanair plane she was travelling on partially collapsed at Dublin airport.
Additional reporting PA
