Ryanair Blamed Weather or Crew Hours? What Actually Counts as Extraordinary

Ryanair's compensation team leans on the same handful of reasons more than any other UK-facing airline: weather, air traffic control, and crew hours. All three sound like they should let the airline off the hook. In practice, only one of them reliably does, and even then only if it actually caused your specific delay. Here's how to tell a genuine extraordinary circumstance from a rejection Ryanair hopes you won't challenge.

The legal test Ryanair has to meet

Under UK261 and EU261, an airline avoids paying compensation only if the disruption was caused by an event that is (1) not inherent in the normal exercise of the airline's activity, and (2) beyond its actual control, even if every reasonable measure had been taken. Ryanair carries the burden of proving both parts for your specific flight. Citing a category of excuse in general terms, without evidence tying it to your delay, is not enough, and it's rejected by CEDR and by the courts on that basis routinely.

Weather: sometimes genuine, often overstated

Severe weather that physically prevents safe operation, an airport closed by snow, fog below landing minimums, a named storm grounding a whole region, is a legitimate extraordinary circumstance. What isn't automatically covered is Ryanair citing "weather" in vague terms for a delay at an airport that stayed open and operating all day. If other airlines' flights departed and landed on schedule from the same airport at the same time, Ryanair's weather excuse for your flight specifically falls apart. Ask for the METAR (official weather report) for your airport at your scheduled time, it's public record, and compare it against what actually happened to other flights.

Air traffic control restrictions

ATC-imposed delays, a slot restriction, airspace closure, or a controller shortage causing knock-on flow restrictions, can count as extraordinary if they genuinely originated outside Ryanair's control. But airlines sometimes label a delay "ATC" when the real cause was that their own aircraft arrived late from a previous rotation and simply missed its original slot. If your aircraft's tail number shows it flew in late from another city before your flight, an ATC slot delay caused by that lateness traces back to Ryanair's own scheduling, not an external event, and compensation is still owed.

Crew hours and rest rules: almost never a valid excuse

This is the one Ryanair leans on hardest and the one with the weakest legal footing. EU and UK flight time limitation rules cap how many hours pilots and cabin crew can work before they legally must rest. When a delay snowballs through the day and a crew "times out," runs out of legal duty hours, requiring a replacement crew or a cancellation, courts have consistently held that crew scheduling is part of an airline's normal operations, not an external event. Ryanair is expected to build enough rostering slack to absorb ordinary disruption. A crew hitting its hours limit because of a delay that started with a technical fault or an earlier rotation running late does not transfer that earlier problem's "extraordinary" status onto the crew shortage; each link in the chain is assessed separately, and a routine rostering squeeze is not extraordinary in its own right.

Technical faults are almost always Ryanair's problem

Ryanair sometimes bundles a technical issue in with a wider "operational disruption" explanation. Routine technical faults, even unexpected ones, are treated as inherent in running an airline and do not excuse payment, unless the fault stems from a manufacturer defect that even the strictest maintenance programme couldn't have caught (a genuinely rare finding).

How to challenge a rejection built on these excuses

• Ask Ryanair, in writing, for the specific cause of your flight's delay, not a general category
• Check whether other flights from the same airport, around the same time, operated normally
• Look at where your aircraft flew from beforehand using its registration, available on public flight tracking sites
• Remember that Ryanair must prove every reasonable measure was taken, not just that something disruptive happened somewhere in the network that day

How to claim

Klaimly cross-checks Ryanair's stated reason against real flight and weather data before we ever submit a claim, so we only pursue cases where the "extraordinary circumstances" excuse doesn't hold up. We handle the whole process for a flat 5% fee, only if we win. No VAT, no minimum fee, and nothing to pay unless your claim succeeds.