Originally Posted by
Cazza_fly
This is absolutely the fault of the airports assistance provider as well as the ground handling agents failing to communicate. This could have happened on any airline and unfortunately has on a number of occassions. It just happened on this occasion to be a Ryanair flight. The thing is, with the passengers most likely "boarded" into the system by the handling agents, no discrepancy on the missing passengers to bags loaded would have shown up. As its rare these days for any airline to do a seat count, the "boarding complete" message would have been passed to the dispatcher and to the crew. There are that many people that book assistance that dont actually end up requiring it, or where they only believe to require it at one end of the journey and so the crew will not have been phased as to why no assistance team came to the aircraft with customers. The assistance passengers will have been in a different location to the actual boarding gate once they had been processed. As someone who has travelled through VIE many times, i can say this is most certainly the case. Those responsibile will be very embarrassed and will need some tightening up of their procedures. However, typical media trying to make out it was entirely the airlines fault without allowing anyone to think for just a minute.
What a load of garbage. EVERY airline has the responsibility to make sure that the onboard passenger count matches what is on the load sheet. No exceptions.