On 8 July 2011, the Tribunal de Pequena Instância Cível de Lisboa (Portugal) lodged a reference for prelimiary ruling of the ECJ questioning the “Sturgeon” judgement of the Court as follows:As a result of the judgment of the Court of Justice of 19 November 2009 in Joined Cases C-402/07 and C-432/07, in which it was held that Articles 5, 6 and 7 of Regulation No 261/2004 must be interpreted as meaning that passengers whose flights are delayed may be treated, for the purposes of the application of the right to compensation, as passengers whose flights are cancelled where the time that they have lost due to the delayed flight is more than three hours, should the said articles be interpreted in the same way in the case of a flight that, having started on time at the place of departure, was delayed at the stop-over airport for three hours and fifty five minutes before taking off again because the airline, for operational reasons, decided to change equipment, where the equipment that replaced the previous equipment had already broken down prior to the stopover and needed a technical intervention, so that the flight arrived at the destination location with the said delay of three hours and fifty five minutes?Case: C-365/11, João Nuno Esteves Coelho dos Santos v. TAP Portugal
