Passengers stranded at Kitchener airport after Christmas Eve flight cancelled due to maintenance and no pilot

Almost 200 people won’t be home for Christmas – or anywhere else for that matter – after their flight to Mexico was cancelled due to a series of missteps by Flair Airlines.

The discount carrier was originally scheduled to leave from Region of Waterloo International Airport for Puerto Vallarta at 7 a.m. on Sunday. There was just one problem – the flight was forced to land at Pearson Airport in Toronto due to fog. Initially that caused a one-hour delay that eventually began to snowball.

Marie Anthony was one of those scheduled to be on the original flight out of Kitchener.

“And then every hour they kept delaying the flight by an hour, so we ended up waiting for almost four hours until they got a plane coming to Waterloo,” she tells CityNews.

When the plane that was scheduled to take passengers south finally arrived, it was taken out of service due to a maintenance issue before finally being cancelled after the pilot reported he had reached his maximum hours of flying and there was no other pilot available.

“I’m wondering why the maintenance issue was not fixed in Toronto,” questioned Anthony. “And now the pilot is off duty? Why didn’t they get a pilot that would be on duty? It’s crazy.”

CityNews reached out to Flair Airlines which said in a statement they had reached out to affected customers to provide meal vouchers, and accommodations and to assist them in getting rebooked on a recovery flight leaving on Monday, Christmas Day.

Anthony says that is little comfort to some of the passengers who were looking to get home to their families.

“There’s literally like families here, people from Mexico planning to go and celebrate Christmas with their families.”

Hundreds of Canadians stranded in Mexico

Flair’s decision to cancel the flight out of Kitchener had a ripple effect of stranding hundreds of Canadians looking to return home from a pre-Christmas vacation facing the reality they would be spending December 25 in Mexico.

Payton Karn tells CityNews her boyfriend and two others were given vouchers and basically left on their own to figure out their next move after being told they would not be coming home until Christmas Day “at the earliest.”

“Obviously we want him home for Christmas because we have all these plans with family …everybody wants their significant other and their kid home for Christmas,” she said. “We were all really stressed out and we tried our best to get them another flight, even if it was with another airline.”

Karn says they managed to find an Air Canada flight but after booking the ticket, her boyfriend was denied boarding because they failed to get to the gate on time after checking in.

They then found a second Air Canada flight, but that one was going to Montreal and would not be arriving back in Toronto until 7:30 a.m. Christmas Day.

Karn says even though she will have to make the drive from Kitchener to Toronto to pick them up, it’s better than the alternative which was to catch the return Flair flight from Mexico meaning “they would have missed most of Christmas.”

“That’s also if Flair didn’t cancel again,” she noted as there is a fog advisory in effect for the Kitchener-Waterloo area Sunday evening and into Monday.