Air Canada Blamed A Damaged Plane To Deny A Passenger $712—But His Plane Was Just Flying Somewhere Else

Air Canada told a passenger his Montreal – Bogota flight was canceled for safety, then used records of damage to a different plane to defend denying him compensation. He checked the aircraft history and won C$1,000 (US$712). The aircraft originally assigned to his flight was moved to cover a different trip. The Canadian Transportation Agency’s complaint resolution officer found that was a commercial decision requiring compensation. It took nearly four years to get the decision. The passenger’s flight was canceled in September 2022. The ruling came in January 2026, and he’s now been paid. Air Canada CAUGHT submitting false, misleading, fraudulent information to deny passenger compensation. Has this happened to you before? It’s happened to me and my family and it’s unbelievably frustrating. The government needs to protect passenger rights! — Sonduren Fanarredha (@lifewitsonduren) October 26, 2026 Here’s what happened: Air Canada said the cancellation involved unforeseen maintenance and rejected the claim for compensation. When the passenger complained to the Canadian regulator, the airline submitted records of an aircraft damaged by a catering truck. Rojas checked public aviation incident records and challenged which aircraft had actually been assigned to his flight. Air Canada had taken his flight’s working plane and reassigned it to replace the damaged one, and cancelled his flight. The dispute was whether damage to that aircraft excused Air Canada from paying passengers whose working plane they’d reassigned. Canada’s rules allow passengers to collect C$400, C$700 or C$1,000 for qualifying disruptions, depending on how late they reach their destination. But there’s an exception for disruptions within the airline’s control that are required for safety. That creates an incentive to classify a cancellation as a safety issue. Another passenger in the video, Michael Bociurkiw, was told his flight was canceled for safety-related maintenance, when Air Canada wanted his scheduled aircraft for passengers headed to Australia instead. Air Canada defends its ability to move aircraft around. They say aircraft assignments are fluid, deny making swaps to avoid compensation, and say they make these decisions to help the greatest number of passengers. They’re going to cancel a flight They’re not doing the swap to avoid compensation The question is whether the flight that had a working plane was cancelled because the plane was unsafe. It can make sense to protect a long haul departure with few alternatives to get passengers to their destination by taking an aircraft from a flight whose passengers can be rebooked more easily. But the passengers giving up their aircraft still have a compensation claim under Canadian law. Here, the safety exemption doesn’t apply to a different group of travelers whose plane was taken to relieve the passengers on the long haul flight. However, knowing that compensation applies is a disincentive to swap the aircraft and protect the long haul customers. This isn’t a new position in Canada – it was underscored in a November 2022 decision involving WestJet where they used the aircraft assigned to a Honolulu–Vancouver flight to rescue passengers from another flight with a fuel tank problem. The swap was operationally reasonable but still ordered C$1,000 for each complainant whose flight was sacrificed. The test an airline has to satify is whether a delay or cancellation is directly attributable to an earlier safety disruption and the airline took all reasonable measures to limit the impact. I’ve written before about Air Canada treating staffing shortages as safety issues to deny compensation. You can’t operate without the required crew, but that doesn’t automatically make a failure to staff the airline a safety risk. In U.S. we see all the time where a passenger gets a maintenance explanation during the delay, then a weather explanation when asking for compensation. And passengers generally don’t have access to operational records to sort out what actually caused their trip to fall apart. In Europe, ordinary technical problems generally don’t excuse compensation. Topics on this page