What’s worse than spending eight hours on a Ryanair plane to get to your destination? Easy — spending eight hours on a Ryanair plane, only to end up exactly where you started. That’s a scenario that travelers faced on a recent Ryanair flight, as reported by PYOK, and it certainly gets at the complexity of the industry.
Newquay-bound Ryanair plane diverts to Dublin, then to Alicante
On Saturday, October 24, 2026, Ryanair flight FR2954 was scheduled to operate from Alicante (ALC) to Newquay (NQY). The 867-mile flight was operated by a Boeing 737-800 with the registration code 9H-QDK, and had a block time of 2hr25min, as it was supposed to depart at 5:25PM and arrive at 6:50PM (with a one hour time change). Unfortunately that’s not how things played out.
First, the plane was running around an hour behind schedule, so it only took off from Alicante at 6:36PM. Roughly two hours later, the plane found itself over Newquay, though there was one issue — weather at the airport was awful, as Storm Austen brought very gusty winds to this part of England.
So the plane descended to 25,000 feet and circled briefly, but then the pilots made the decision to divert to Dublin (DUB), as it was clear that conditions wouldn’t improve. The plane landed in Dublin at 8:43PM, 3hr7min after it first departed (there was a time change of one hour).
From there, the plane was refueled, and Ryanair’s operations team regrouped, to come up with a new plan. At this point it was too late to fly to Newquay (the terminal seems to have limited operating hours), so the decision was made to fly to Bristol (BRS), 119 miles from Newquay, and then to bus passengers to their destination. Obviously that would’ve still been really rough, but it was viewed as the best option here.
The plane finally took off again at 10:34PM, around two hours after it landed in Dublin. Within 25 minutes, the plane was close to Bristol, though conditions still hadn’t improved, and there were no signs of that changing.
So rather than diverting back to Dublin, or elsewhere, the crew instead decided to divert to Alicante, which was the origin airport. Keep in mind that this was way further from Bristol than Dublin. So the plane landed there at 2:12AM, 2hr38min after it departed (this time there was a time change of one hour in the other direction).
For those doing the math, that means passengers spent well over eight hours onboard this Ryanair 737, only to end up where they started.
Why would Ryanair divert a flight all the way back to Alicante?
Logically, some people are probably wondering why Ryanair made the decision to divert a Newquay-bound flight all the way back to Alicante, instead of to Dublin. The former is 867 miles from the destination, while the latter is just 213 miles from the destination.
I suspect the answer here comes down to Ryanair’s business model — Ryanair has bases across Europe, and this particular plane was based in Alicante. So operationally, the airline decided that it made the most sense to have the plane and crew back in Alicante, so that operations the following day wouldn’t be impacted, and create a domino effect.
Regardless of where passengers would’ve been stranded, Ryanair is on the hook for covering their essential expenses, including lodging. However, the passengers wouldn’t be entitled to EC261 cash compensation, since this would be considered an extraordinary circumstance.
Understandably this would probably have been frustrating for passengers, who would’ve rather just flown from Dublin to Newquay the following day. However, keep in mind that when they took off from Dublin, the idea was to land in Bristol, but the weather didn’t ultimately allow that.
Some may point out that Dublin is a massive base for Ryanair, so you’d think they’d be able to efficiently divert the plane there, have a new crew, etc. That’s not quite that straightforward, though, because Ryanair has a handful of subsidiaries, each with their own planes and crews. This particular plane was Malta registered, separate from the carrier’s standard Irish air operator certificate.
Bottom line
Passengers booked on a Ryanair flight from Alicante to Newquay were in for quite the adventure. Due to bad weather at the destination, the flight first diverted to Dublin. The goal was then to fly to Bristol and bus passengers to Newquay. However, weather there proved bad as well, so the decision was ultimately made to divert back to the origin, Alicante.
In the end, passengers spent well over eight hours onboard this plane, only to end up at their origin… talk about a rough evening!
What do you make of this Ryanair eight hour “flight to nowhere?”
Membership is free and takes no more information than commenting as a guest. Earn status points for good contributions, and see fewer ads as your status grows.