Ryanair sued after bottle hit woman

A woman who has been left with a scar on her nose after a glass bottle fell out of an overhead locker on a Ryanair flight plane and hit her in the face has sued the airline for damages.

Mother of two Victoria Fox told the High Court yesterday she had to cancel her 40th birthday celebrations after she was left with a wound on her nose and bruising around her eyes after the incident last year.

Liability has been conceded in the case, which is before the court for assessment of damages only.

Ms Fox had just returned after a few days in Rome and had landed at Dublin Airport when the accident happened on March 24, 2015, as the Ryanair flight was standing on the tarmac.

Ms Fox, from Primrose St, Ringsend, Dublin, said a whole week of events around her birthday had to be cancelled due to the accident.

She said she was sitting in Row 24 in an aisle seat and talking to her husband after the flight landed and came to a halt. A passenger jumped up to get his bag from the overhead locker and she was commenting on that when a bottle of duty-free drink dislodged and fell, hitting her in the face.

“The bottle came straight down and hit me in the face,” she said. “I let out a scream. There was blood all over my head.”

She said the bottle may have fallen out when the man moved his bag, but the bottle did not belong to him. She said when an ambulance arrived, paramedics cleaned the wound on the bridge of her nose, but she did not go to hospital. She had bruising around the eyes afterwards.

Ms Fox said she later suffered whoppers of headaches and had black eyes for a couple of days.

“It was embarrassing . I was super conscious of how I looked,” she added.

She said she had been told to expect headaches but she did not expect them to be so prolonged or severe and she found it difficult studying for her psychiatric nursing exams in college.

Mr Justice Bernard Barton, who will next week put a figure on the level of damages, said the scar Ms Fox has been left with is not a significant disfiguring scar but it is discernible.

He said that, for all the conversation in society about equality, the fact remains that external appearances such as the face remains a matter of significance mainly for women rather that men and there was nothing surprising about that.

The case will resumeon Tuesday.