Airlines continue to flout European laws over compensation for cancelled flights. Passengers can claim compensation of up to £475 for a cancelled flight, but airlines can avoid these costs if they cite extraordinary circumstances, such as mechanical breakdown or poor weather. There is currently no obligation for carriers to record the reasons for cancellations, which affect about 2.7% of all departures.

Flight-data analyst Hendrik Noorderhaven – whose company, EUclaim.co.uk, pursues passenger compensation claims in return for 24% of the payout – says it is too easy for airlines to exploit the compensation exemption loophole when flights have in fact been cancelled for purely commercial or logistical reasons.

“Currently, the only place a technical malfunction has to be registered is in the aircraft’s logbook,” says Noorderhaven, “but it’s possible to track every aircraft in the world through it’s tail number. So, when an airline says a flight has been cancelled because a specific aircraft has a technical problem, we can double-check.”

Using historical flight data to research claims, Noorderhaven says he can prove where an airliner was at any time and what its flight status was. He cites the case of a Swiss carrier that cancelled a flight from Zurich due to a power failure. “We found they’d given the tail number of a different aircraft – one that had the logbook entry to prove a power failure, but definitely not the plane assigned to the cancelled flight. The airline paid out €250 to each passenger within 72 hours.”

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