More than 350 holidaymakers are due to return to England today after spending two nights stranded in an Egyptian airport.

The passengers, many of them parents travelling with young children, were due to catch a Monarch flight from the popular Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh when it broke down before take-off on Sunday evening.

They endured two nights and a day of sweltering temperatures, which reached 68F (37C), inside the airport while engineers waited for a spare part to be brought in from Cairo.

Some passengers claimed they were rationed to just one 600ml bottle of water a day, while one mother alleged that airport staff refused to help when she ran out of powdered baby milk.

All the 358 tourists were put up in a local hotel after the chaos on Sunday night, but problems with transport and allocation meant they did not arrive in their rooms until the early hours of the following morning.

A mechanical part was flown from Cairo on Monday to repair a hydraulic leak on the aeroplane, but when this failed to work another one had to be flown in from Luton.

However, there were still problems with the plane and when passengers returned to the airport in time to depart on Monday evening, the flight was grounded again.

The tourists were made to wait for more than eight hours before being dispatched back to their hotels again.

A spokesman for Monarch Airlines said an alternative plane has been flown in from the UK and is due to depart for Gatwick at 6.05pm local time, 15.05pm GMT.

The spokesman said: “The Airbus A330, flight MON5279 suffered a hydraulic leak prior to departure at 6.45pm on Sunday.

“As no part to fix the problem was available in Sharm El Sheik, it was dispatched from Cairo and all 358 passengers transferred to hotels overnight.

“Unfortunately, on arrival, the part was incompatible with the aircraft and an alternative was subsequently sent out from the UK.

"This resulted in a further delay to the departure of the flight and passengers remained in hotels on 26 May, where breakfast and lunch was available to them.

“The passengers on the flight were advised of a 8.00pm departure and returned to the airport during the afternoon. Regrettably, the part that was sent out from the UK failed to fix the problem with the aircraft.

“Passengers were therefore returned to hotels, where they currently remain and an alternative aircraft is being sent from the UK to fly them back.”

Monique Merrick, 28, who had just finished a one-week holiday in Sharm El Sheikh, said passengers were not informed of what was happening.

She said: “Nothing seemed to be happening, and then they said there was a problem with the plane but we were still kept there for three hours with only one cup of water each.

“We were then told to collect our bags, but mine, my boyfriend’s and another lady’s didn’t turn up.

“All of her medicine for her heart problems and cancer was in there, but the staff just didn’t seem to care.

“We were shipped to a hotel and didn’t check in until 3am yesterday morning and weren’t given any food.”

Her boyfriend Stephen Siemienski, a 26-year-old city trader, said: “We were told an engineer was being flown from Cairo with a part, and then that didn’t work so they’d have to fly another part from Luton.

“No one was giving us any information.

“In the end the pilot had to come out and talk to us, but it’s just disgraceful the way we’ve been treated.”

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