Woman sues Ryanair after bottle falls onto her face

A woman left with a scar on her nose after she was struck in the face by a glass bottle which fell from an overhead locker on a Ryanair plane has sued for damages.

Victoria Fox (40) told the High Court she had to cancel her fortieth birthday party celebrations after suffering a wound on her nose and black bruising around her eyes as a result of the incident.

She has sued Ryanair over the incident whch happened on March 24th, 2015 shortly after her flight back to Dublin from Rome, where she had spent a few days, landed at Dublin Airport.

The airline has conceded liability and the case is before the court for assessment of damages only.

In evidence, Ms Fox, a mother of two, of Primrose Street, Ringsend, Dublin said a whole week of events around her birthday had to be cancelled as a result of the accident.

She said she was sitting on row 24 on an aisle seat talking to her husband after the flight, which had been delayed leaving Rome, landed in Dublin 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 dislodged and fell, hitting her in the face, she said.

“The bottle came straight down and hit me in the face. 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 an ambulance arrived, the crew cleaned the wound on the bridge of her nose but she was not taken to hospital.

She had bruising around the eyes afterwards and 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 said.

She said she was told to expect headaches but 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 assess the amount of damages, said the nose scar is not a significant disfiguring scar but it is discernible.

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

The case resumes on Tuesday.