The flight, LS167, had left Glasgow shortly after 3.15pm on Wednesday, bound for Lanzarote and due to land at around 7.50pm. Somewhere over the journey south, one of the passengers fell seriously ill, and the crew judged it wiser not to wait the extra couple of hours to reach the Canaries. Instead they diverted to the nearest airport that could help, which turned out to be Faro, on the southern coast of Portugal, a large, well-equipped airport that sits roughly halfway along the route and is a common place for flights between northern Europe and the Canaries to break their journey in a hurry.
By the time the Boeing 737-800 arrived, medical teams were already waiting on the tarmac. The passenger was taken off the aircraft and on to hospital, while the rest of those on board settled in to wait. After a couple of hours on the ground, the plane was cleared to continue and completed the final stretch south to Lanzarote. For the holidaymakers aboard, it meant a delay of a couple of hours to the start of their break, a small price that few would begrudge knowing a fellow traveller's wellbeing was at stake.
Why Flights Divert for Medical Reasons
Turning off course for a health scare is more routine than many travellers imagine, and it reflects how carefully airlines look after the people on board. Cabin crews are trained to handle illness in the air, they can call on medical advice from the ground by radio, and when someone needs urgent care the priority is always to land safely and quickly at the nearest airport that can help. Faro comes up time and again as a diversion point for exactly this reason, and the captain's decision to stop there, rather than press on to Lanzarote, was almost certainly the right one for the passenger involved. No details have been shared about who they were or what was wrong, which is only right, and we join everyone who was on the flight in wishing them a swift and full recovery. For the rest of those on LS167, the Lanzarote holiday simply started a couple of hours later than planned, under the island's reliable sunshine.
