Evidence: how to prove a flight delay claim

Compensation claims are decided on documents. There is no hearing at alternative dispute resolution and rarely a contested one in the small claims track, so whoever has the clearer paper trail tends to win. This guide sets out which single fact decides most claims, what to capture before you leave the airport, what to collect in the days afterwards, how to reconstruct a claim for a flight from years ago, and how to present it all so it can be checked in two minutes.

The arrival time is the fact that decides it

Almost every delay claim turns on one number: how late you reached your final destination. Not how late the flight pushed back, not how long you sat on the aircraft, and not the leg that went wrong if you were connecting. Three hours or more and compensation is due. Two hours fifty-nine and it is not. Once you have both times, the compensation checker turns them into a figure.

The definition is more precise than most people assume. In Germanwings v Henning, C-452/13, the Court of Justice held that arrival time refers to the moment at which at least one of the aircraft doors was opened and passengers were actually permitted to leave. That is typically several minutes after touchdown and after the on-blocks time an airline will quote. On a claim sitting close to the three-hour line, those minutes decide the outcome, which is why a photograph of a clock at the moment the doors opened is worth more than any other piece of evidence you can collect.

Before you leave the airport

• Photograph the arrivals or departures board showing the flight number and the actual times. Include something in frame that dates it if you can.
• Note the time the doors opened and take a photograph then, not later. A picture of the jet bridge with a visible timestamp is ideal.
• Keep the boarding passes. Photograph paper ones, screenshot mobile ones. App wallets are cleared out sooner than you expect.
• Screenshot every airline message. Delay notifications, gate changes, rebooking confirmations, and anything sent through the app rather than by email.
• Write down what you were told and by whom. A gate announcement blaming a technical issue is significant, because technical faults are generally not extraordinary.
• Keep receipts for anything you buy. Meals, drinks, a hotel, transfers. These are a separate claim under duty of care and are reimbursable even where no compensation is due.

What to collect in the days afterwards

Some of the useful material only becomes available once you are home, and some of it disappears quickly, so do this in the first week rather than when you get round to it.

The stated reason deserves particular care

Airlines often describe the cause one way at the airport and another way in the refusal letter. A gate agent who says the inbound aircraft went technical, followed six weeks later by a letter citing air traffic control restrictions, is a discrepancy worth putting directly to the airline, because a routine technical fault is not an extraordinary circumstance while an air traffic control restriction generally is. The case law behind that distinction is in extraordinary circumstances explained.

Note also that you do not have to disprove the airline's reason. The defence belongs to the carrier, so it must show both that the event was outside its control and that it took all reasonable measures. Your job is to record what you were told and to point out when the story changes.

Reconstructing an older claim

You can claim up to six years back in England and Wales, and five in Scotland, so a flight you had written off may still be live. Working backwards is entirely possible.

1. Search your email for the booking reference. Confirmations, check-in reminders and disruption notices all live there, and email is the one archive most people never delete.
2. Check card and bank statements for the ticket purchase, and for any airport spending on the day, which incidentally evidences how long you were stuck there.
3. Ask the airline for its record. A carrier holds the operational data, and a data subject access request will generally produce the times it holds for your flight. That is often the cleanest way to establish an old arrival time.
4. Look at your own photographs. Phone images carry timestamps and often location data, so a picture taken in the terminal can date and place you precisely.
5. Ask anyone you travelled with. A second person's boarding pass or messages sent from the airport at the time both help.

How to present it

Keep the covering message short and put the evidence behind it. State the airline, flight number, date and route, the booking reference, the scheduled arrival, the actual arrival and the difference between them in hours and minutes, then the figure claimed and the number of passengers. Attach the documents as clearly named files rather than a bundle of screenshots, and itemise any care costs against the receipts.

Two habits make a real difference at the escalation stage. Keep every message you send and receive, because the eight-week clock and the twelve-month ADR deadline both run from dates you will need to prove, as set out in the escalation ladder. And store everything somewhere permanent - a single folder in cloud storage - rather than relying on an airline app that clears its history after a season. Once the evidence is assembled, the wording of the claim itself is straightforward and is set out in claiming it yourself, for free.