AN Auchinleck pensioner was left stranded in London for SIX hours after her British Airways flight to Glasgow Airport was overbooked.

Roberta Kyle, who has dementia, was forced to wait at Heathrow on Thursday with her daughter, Annette McGowan, on a replacement flight only to be told she was “too late” despite arriving at security 50 minutes before its departure.

Annette was left fuming with the way BA staff treated her mother and has demanded an apology from the firm’s CEO Alex Cruz.

In a letter to Mr Cruz, Annette said: “My 77-year-old mother, who is suffering from vascular dementia, was bumped from her flight.

“We were offered no explanation. The experience was humiliating leaving my mother confused and upset and causing considerable inconvenience.

“I am simply seeking to avoid such a distressing and inconvenient situation happening to my mother in the future.”

Roberta had been due to fly from Heathrow at 1:10pm but, 15 minutes after arriving at the airport, she was informed she had been “bumped” from the plane.

The airline re-accommodated the 77-year-old on the 4:20pm flight, which was delayed by almost an hour, but wasn’t allowed through security as she hadn’t arrived an hour before the scheduled take-off.

Roberta eventually left Heathrow on the 5:55pm flight, six hours after she arrived.

A BA spokeswoman said: ““We offered our customer compensation for agreeing to travel on a later flight. We also gave her a meal voucher to make sure she had a comfortable wait, and arranged a wheelchair to get her to the replacement flight.

“When she missed this, we recognised that was a genuine error and offered her a new flight.

“Many airlines operate overbooking policies because experience shows that a small number of passengers, having made their bookings, do not turn up for the flight. If all such seats were left empty, it would stop other customers from travelling on the day they wanted.

“By careful monitoring of booking and load patterns for each flight, we do our best to maximise the number of customers able to travel on each service.

“On the rare occasions when the number of booked customers turning up exceeds the number of seats available, we usually resolve the issue by offering a financial sum to customers willing to accept a confirmed booking on an alternative flight.”