Passengers had been stranded at Jersey Airport for about nine hours

The pilot announced the BMI Baby flight would pick up stranded Jersey vacationers shortly before take-off.

Passenger Helena Coates told Radio Five Live requests by some of the 89 people on board to disembark were ignored.

BMI Baby has apologised and says it is looking into compensation for passengers.

A spokeswoman said passengers in Edinburgh had been unable to disembark from Friday's flight WW5198 because of operational issues such as retrieving luggage from the plane's hold.

She said the flight had already been running late, and the 46 passengers in Jersey had been stranded for about nine hours while the plane scheduled to fly them to Cardiff underwent technical checks.

It wouldn't have mattered what we'd done, BMI Baby would have just hijacked us and taken us to wherever they thought we needed to go Helena Coates passenger

Ms Coates told Five Live the plane had taxied around Edinburgh Airport's runway for about half an hour before take-off.

"Then the pilot announced that due to some kind of unusual circumstance we would have to be going to Jersey before we went to Nottingham East Midlands because some passengers were stranded in Jersey and he said that that wasn't fair.

"We didn't think it was fair either - that we would be going to Jersey."

Ms Coates claimed the Jersey passengers had expected to go to Cardiff and were unaware flight WW5198 was instead flying to Nottingham East Midlands.

Coach journey

"After they'd settled down, the pilot announced that we would be going to Cardiff, but all the East Midlands passengers, as you can imagine, were quite angry about this," she said.

"There was a bit of a general outcry."

A BMI Baby spokeswoman told BBC News Online there had never been any intention for flight WW5198 to fly to Cardiff.

She said the plane had touched down at Nottingham East Midlands Airport at 0100 GMT on Saturday - three hours after its scheduled arrival time - and the Jersey passengers completed their journey to Cardiff by coach.

Ms Coates said those on board the flight were powerless to do anything.

"We were very much in the airline's hands," she said.

"It wouldn't have mattered what we'd done, BMI Baby would have just hijacked us and taken us to wherever they thought we needed to go."