An update to the EU ruling.

Today (11/06/14) a Court of Appeal Judge has upheld the earlier ruling that airlines can no longer use technical faults as a blanket excuse to avoid compensating passengers for flight delays.

In his ruling, Lord Justice Elias said that technical faults could only be considered as "out of the ordinary" if they "stem from events which, by their nature or origin, are not inherent in the normal exercise of the activity of the air carrier concerned".

He added: "In the context of technical problems one must crucially ask what caused the technical problem. If the cause of the technical problem is one which is 'inherent in the normal exercise of the activity of the air carrier concerned' then it necessarily follows that it is also within the control of the carrier and therefore not extraordinary.

"In this case the cause of the technical problem was simply wear and tear and the Court quite rightly took a common sense approach to this and held that wear and tear is entirely ordinary and therefore not extraordinary."