What’s worse than spending eight hours on a Ryanair plane to get to your destination? Easy — spending eight hours on a Ryanair plane, only to end up exactly where you started. That’s a scenario that travelers faced on a recent Ryanair flight, as reported by PYOK , and it certainly gets at the complexity of the industry.

Newquay-bound Ryanair plane diverts to Dublin, then to Alicante

Why would Ryanair divert a flight all the way back to Alicante?

Bottom line

Newquay-bound Ryanair plane diverts to Dublin, then to Alicante

On Saturday, October 24, 2026, Ryanair flight FR2954 was scheduled to operate from Alicante (ALC) to Newquay (NQY). The 867-mile flight was operated by a Boeing 737-800 with the registration code 9H-QDK , and had a block time of 2hr25min, as it was supposed to depart at 5:25PM and arrive at 6:50PM (with a one hour time change). Unfortunately that’s not how things played out.

First, the plane was running around an hour behind schedule, so it only took off from Alicante at 6:36PM.…