Eighty three passengers were left stranded when their plane took off without them while they were stuck in border control queues at Marseille airport over the weekend.
A Ryanair flight from Marseille to Marrakesh took off without 83 of the passengers who had booked tickets, as they were still stuck in queues for border control at the airport.
The Marseille-Provence airport operator blamed a lack of border guards (police aux frontières) for the hours-long queues at the airport on Saturday evening.
The incidents follows on from several other reports of passengers being stranded at European airports due to long queues – including 100 passengers stranded in Milan last week – following the full introduction of the EU’s new EES biometric passport checks.
Marseille airport operators did not specifically reference EES checks, saying only that the problem was short-staffing of border guards, but the Marseille-Marrakesh flight is across an EU external border, so EES checks would apply for any passengers who are not citizens of an EU country such as France.
Ryanair said that it had initially delayed the 10.30pm take-off to allow passengers to board, but said that it was obliged to respect its “operational obligations”, so decided to leave without 83 people.
Local radio station Ici reported angry scenes in the airport, as passengers tried to force their way through, and on the plane among those passengers who had managed to board.
Marseille airport says that it has launched an investigation into what it calls an “exceptionally rare” event.
The full rollout of the EES passport checks came into effect on April 10th – although France has not yet implemented full checks at the UK border, due to concerns about long delays at busy crossing points such as the Port of Dover and London Saint Pancras station.
Although passengers in French airports had reported longer than usual queues in recent weeks, France had so far been mostly spared the exceptionally long queues seen in neighbouring countries such as Spain and Italy.
READ ALSO: Eurotunnel and Eurostar still not ready for EES rollout despite deadline✎
