Airline Eurowings have been fined $225,000 (around £188,000) after leaving passengers stranded on a plane for well over 4 hours.
The fine comes after the incident which happened in 2019.
Flight EW1182 from Dusseldorf to Miami was forced to divert after bad weather. It landed in Fort Lauderdale (30 miles from Miami) – where they were unable to deplane due to a lack of luggage handlers.
US Customs warned that passengers were only able to get off if their luggage was also offloaded. But there were not enough baggage handlers available to do this.
After many hours, luggage handlers became available to assist, but the airline crew decided to then not deplane, hoping instead the journey could soon be resumed.
However, after almost 4 hours onboard, crew were informed that Miami Airport was still closed due to adverse weather.
The laws in the USA stated that airlines operate and comply with restrictions on the amount of time a plane can sit on the tarmac.
For domestic flights, this time period is three hours, while international flights have a maximum of four hours before they must start deplaning passengers.
Eurowings, a subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group, is ordered to pay half of the fine within 30 days.
Eurowings are a low cost flight operator that mainly operate short haul routes, but do also feature several long haul destinations.
