Passengers Taped their Plane Together
August 30, 2005German vacationers coming back from Turkey found themselves using adhesive tape to stick together the interior of a plane operated by a Turkish airline with a troubled safety record, a German newspaper said on Tuesday. The midair repair job came during an Onur Air flight from Antalya in southern Turkey to the eastern German city of Leipzig, the Bild newspaper said. "The pilot started the engines. Suddenly a piece of the interior of the plane fell on our heads. Some of the holidaymakers started to scream," one of the passengers, Gunnar Storch, 34, told the paper. "A female flight attendant immediately ran into the cockpit to ask for the takeoff to be aborted. But the pilot wasn't in the least bit interested. He just carried on. Behind the interior casing, we could see the exposed wiring. It wasn't a very reassuring sight." The plane later landed safely in Leipzig but Storch said "no one was interested" when he tried to report the incident at the airport. There was no immediate reaction to the report from either the Turkish airline or Airbus. Onur Air was briefly banned from Dutch skies in May for security reasons, with France, Switzerland and Germany following suit. The four countries decided on a progressive lifting of the ban after the airline put forward a program of safety improvements.