The High Court awarded Ryanair cabin supervisor Fiona Nangle €84,790 after finding that de-icing fluid residue likely caused her to slip aboard an aircraft and that Ryanair had failed to warn cabin crew of the known hazard.
In a judgment delivered on 17 May 2022, Mr Justice Alexander Owens awarded €70,000 in general damages and €14,790 in agreed special damages. The judgment gives no breakdown of the special damages.
Ms Nangle was injured shortly after take-off on a Ryanair flight from Dublin to Warsaw on 11 February 2018. She had been walking across the vinyl floor near the forward galley when her right foot slipped. She fractured her right humerus and injured the radial nerve. The judgment says she later recovered normal hand function and elbow movement, but retained numbness in parts of her right hand and a permanent scar from elbow to shoulder.
The judge accepted her evidence that she slipped on something slippery, rather than tripping. He concluded that de-icing residue was the likely cause. He relied in part on the manufacturer’s information that the fluid can dry to a thin greasy film, which may be difficult to see. The judge was marginally more persuaded by the plaintiff’s engineer on how long the residue could remain a slipping hazard. The court also heard evidence that de-icing fluid was a recognised cabin hazard and that Ryanair had documented three cabin crew slips attributed to it in late 2017 and early 2018.
The court found that Ryanair failed, so far as reasonably practicable, to ensure Ms Nangle’s safety by not warning cabin crew about the hazard before her injury. A seasonal advisory was issued the day after the fall. The judge considered an earlier warning sufficient to discharge the company’s duty in relation to this risk.
The judge rejected the claim that Ryanair was negligent for not extending the mat from the front passenger door to the bulkhead, saying that covering all vinyl areas of aircraft galleys, toilets and entrances would go beyond what was reasonably practicable. He also rejected Ryanair’s submission that Ms Nangle was herself negligent for failing to watch for the hazard.
The judgment noted that grounds of defence raised at trial had not been set out in the personal injuries defence, depriving the plaintiff of advance notice and limiting her engineer’s opportunity to address them. It also criticised the late provision of the defendant engineer’s report. The judge said evidence on the airport’s post-de-icing clean-up, initially ruled inadmissible, was admissible on reflection and took it into account.