Almost 24 waiting to take the plane, without information, forced to move from the Florence airport to the Pisa airport and to share rooms during the night. This is the odyssey that happened to the 150 passengers on the Volotea flight headed to Palermo which, at least on paper, should have left yesterday, Friday 28 June, at 2.50 pm. A day later, however, the passengers are still there, waiting to leave, including families with babies of a few months and people travelling with animals, with the anger that inevitably begins to mount.
«We are at the mercy of nothingnessan absurd thing” say the passengers still stuck at the airport. “I had to go back to visit my family in Sicily for the weekend and leave on Monday – says Enrico Deiana – instead I’m stuck here. We are all exhausted, there are also children, one is just a month and a half old.” The flight that was supposed to leave on Friday at 2.50pm first accumulated a significant but still manageable delay, initially the time of 4pm appeared on the board, then 4.45pm, then the passengers were told that they would leave at 5pm, 30. It was around 7.30pm when it was announced that the flight had been canceled and that the passengers would have to move to Pisa airport, spending the night in a hotel in Tirrenia.
Someone managed to get there around 10.30pm, but not everyone was so lucky. «Another problem arose when boarding the bus – says Susanna Bagnai, who is traveling with her eight-year-old child – there were about ten places missing, we had to wait for the next bus and we arrived at the hotel around half past midnight. At that point, however, there were no rooms for everyone, I had to share a room with another girl. I couldn’t put the baby to bed before one in the morning. We had to go to an event, now I don’t even know if we’ll get there in time. And I’m lucky, there are families with younger children who risk running out of formula.” Then there are those who didn’t even manage to take the bus back to the airport this morning.. «They told us that we would leave today at 10:15 and that we would be notified of the bus time – explains Gaetano Fortunato, who came to Florence for a convention – but the notice was not sent to everyone, so some of us also had to pay for a taxi to get to the airport. Once we arrived we had to go through the whole check-in process again, while the flight was moved again, first by ten minutes, then to 10:45, to 11:40 and now they explained to us that a plane from Verona should arrive and that we should leave at 12:45. It’s a tough situation, if they had given us clearer explanations from the beginning maybe some of us would have looked for alternative solutions to return home. Instead we lost 24 hours of our lives.”
