Passengers including hundreds of Nigerians on board Air France flight from France to Lagos and Abuja have since Wednesday been stranded at Charles De Gaulle International Airport, Paris.
Many of them have slept at the airport since Wednesday owing to what the management of the airline described as malfunctioning of their planes and lack of aviation fuel.
According to NAN, some of the passengers had left Lagos and Abuja for various destinations while many were returning to Lagos en route the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Many of the passengers, who in their bookings had about three to five hours layover in Paris, were left stranded.
Some, who were lucky to get the seats in the allied airlines were re-routed and had to spend additional hours to get to their destinations.
Many of the passengers complained of ill treatment and alleged flouting of standard aviation regulatory operations.
More pathetic were the vulnerable passengers – the elderly, women with children and some with disability, who went through harrowing experiences.
Olagunju Ojo and Afolake Arikewuyo, who are in their late 70s, said they left the US for Lagos en route Paris on Tuesday only to be left stranded at the airport.
The women, who could barely speak English and do not understand French, were in the long queue unassisted while struggling to get their cancelled flight to Lagos re-routed.
They said they arrived the airport 12 hours earlier only to be told that their flight to Lagos had been cancelled and there was no alternative arrangement for the day.
Ojo, who spoke in Yoruba language, said: “We cannot go to Lagos today and there is no Schengen visa to take us outside the airport to sleep.
“They said we will sleep at the airport here and there is no way to communicate with my people waiting for me at the airport at home and those I left in the US.”
Another passenger, Theresa Fashida, also an elderly woman, said she left Ireland for Lagos en route Paris and had been at the airport for eight hours struggling to see how her cancelled flight could be re-routed.
Fashida said the airline later succeeded in re-routing her flight through Nairobi, Kenya from where she would travel to Lagos with Kenyan Airways the following day.
“The flight from Paris to Nairobi is tomorrow, that means I have to sleep at this airport because there is no hotel accommodation provision for me and I do not have Schengen visa,” she said.
“I did not book Nairobi flight; I don’t know why they should make me to pass through these pains with my age.
“You can see, this is the only pack of food given to me since I arrived at this airport and even their airline officials are not friendly at all.”
Some other Lagos bound passengers were rerouted to South Africa.
Ssome of the passengers, who left Lagos for official engagement in Washington DC, were also left stranded at the Charles De Gaulle Airport.
The passengers, among whom were journalists, had departed Murtala Mohammed International Airport around 11 pm on Tuesday aboard Airbus 340-800 Flight AF109 and arrived in Paris around 6:30am Wednesday.
With a scheduled flight from Paris to Washington at 12:30pm on Wednesday, they were supposed to have a layover of about six hours before departure.
However, after eight hours of waiting at the departure hall, the airline officials announced a technical fault on the Airbus A380-800 Flight Number AF0054 prepared for the journey.
The operators announced that their team of engineers and other staff were working on the aircraft and also expected to overcome the challenge of fuel before take-off.
After several more hours of waiting at the lounge, the officials announced a cancellation of the fight owing to “technical fault and shortage of aviation fuel”.
They directed the passengers to a point for possible flight rescheduling which they said could not accommodate the 500 passengers on board the botched flight.
At the flight rescheduling counter where passengers had converged, there.