Everyone seemingly has a few air-travel horror stories under their seatbelts. Mine generally revolve around my unbeatable talent for getting stuck overnight in airports. And no question about it, an expensive price is paid to experience such inconveniences, which also happen to include bare feet antics and unruly, drunken fellow passengers.
Sometimes, however, things get very out of hand. A Southwest Airlines passenger was arrested in 2022 for repeatedly masturbating during a flight, and while that is unspeakable, one can hope that he at least kept his bodily fluids to himself. That unfortunately was not the case during a September 1 Delta flight that took off from Atlanta en route to Barcelona. The flight didn’t make it too far (only to Virginia), but at least things didn’t start to get rough over the Atlantic Ocean. Because reportedly, a “diarrhea incident” occurred at so many different spots on the plane that it became a “biohazard,” and the flight had to turn around shortly after takeoff. Via CNN, here’s a real yikes:
“It’s just a biohazard issue, we had a passenger who had diarrhea all the way through the airplane so they want us to come back to Atlanta,” a DL 194 pilot said to air traffic control.
Delta told CNN that the flight was delayed just over eight hours, but landed in Barcelona without further incident on Saturday at 5.16 p.m. local time. “Our teams worked as quickly and safely as possible to get our customers to their final destination,” a spokesperson said. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the delay and inconvenience to their travel plans.”
There are no winners in that story, and obviously, nothing about the situation could be helped once in motion.
That’s not all, though. Another recent report revealed that Air Canada found themselves apologizing to a pair of passengers who were instructed to sit in vomit-laced seats that were not adequately cleaned between flights. At one point, the passengers were allegedly threatened with being put on a “no-fly list” if they continued to protest. And if that’s not enough gross-out material for you, a July Air France flight went off the rails after a passenger found a blood-and-fecal stain underneath two seats on the day after a man reportedly suffered a “hemorrhage” on an international flight. Nightmare city.
Staycations are sounding pretty good right about now, wouldn’t you agree?
(Via CNN)