Air Canada passengers held on plane for over 90 minutes while RCMP investigated flight attendant’s missing passport

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This article was published 25/06/2018 (2635 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Passengers were stuck in their seats for at least 90 minutes Sunday night after an Air Canada flight landed on the tarmac in Winnipeg, due to a flight attendant’s missing passport.

Two RCMP officers boarded the passenger jet, on a domestic trip to Winnipeg from Montreal, after it landed at Richardson International Airport around 9 p.m., passenger Ruth Swan told the Free Press.

Swan, a Winnipegger who was returning home from Switzerland, said passengers were told they would each be interviewed about the missing document. An hour had passed by the time she and her partner were interviewed by police, Swan said, adding the plane was still half-full.

“I felt sorry for the people in the last row,” she said Monday.

Swan, a retired historian, said it began to get hot in the jet as the officers made their rounds, taking pictures of dozens of passengers’ passports and asking each person how many times they had gotten up to go to the bathroom throughout the flight.

“There had been a heat wave in Europe last week, and I had broken out with a heat rash and I needed to get home to take a pill and put on some gel and the gel was in my suitcase, so I couldn’t do anything while I was on the plane,” she said. “We’d also been up for almost 24 hours at that point, so we were really tired. We wanted to get home to bed.”

She said she watched the 2012 movie Argo, a drama about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, on the plane, which didn’t help matters. The worst thing, however, Swan said, was there were families waiting on the plane with babies and young children.

Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick said police met the flight because of the “apparent theft of valuable personal items from a crew member.”

The airline apologized for the delay caused by the investigation, he said, adding he couldn’t comment further because it was a police matter.

“I was ready for someone to get really upset and go to the front of the plane and yell at the officers and someone get dragged off the plane because it was a connecting flight,” said Jonah Levy, an 18-year-old from Montreal who said the passport still hadn’t been found by the time he gave police his statement — 90 minutes after landing.

Levy said he was one of the last 10 passengers on board. He said he told police he went to the bathroom three times during the flight, and hadn’t seen any suspicious activity near the back area, where the flight attendant allegedly left her bag with the passport inside.

“They opened the back door of the plane to allow better air flow. They told everyone to turn their fans on because it was getting really, really stuffy in there. The longest people were sitting on that plane had to be just under two hours.”

Levy, who is spending the summer in Manitoba as a camp counsellor, said it was sweaty and inconvenient — but it wasn’t all bad. He said he made friends with the British woman sitting next to him. They joked about staging a fight in order to be escorted off the plane, he said with a laugh.

Winnipeg Airports Authority director of corporate communications and public affairs Tyler MacAfee said he wasn’t sure what the status of the missing passport was as of Monday afternoon, adding the matter is between RCMP and the airline.

RCMP did not respond to a request for comment.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie