Footage has emerged of the “onboard medical emergency” that forced a US airliner back to Atlanta only two hours into its flight to Spain: a messy trail of diarrhea left by a struggling passenger.
Maintenance crews spent five hours cleaning the Delta Airlines Airbus A350 after its enforced early landing, including replacing an aisle carpet ruined in the incident.
Passengers, reportedly including the one suffering diarrhea, were allowed to re-board after an eight-hour delay, making it to Barcelona on Saturday afternoon with no further incident.
Accounts from some onboard posted to social media described flight crew doing their best to mop up the mess with paper towels and scented disinfectant. But that only had the effect of making the plane “smell of vanilla shit”, one passenger said.
Another described cabin crew placing an absorbent paper “runner” over the aisle, and passengers having to climb over seats to avoid it as they left the plane at Atlanta.
An audio recording of a conversation between the pilot and air traffic control revealed the reason for the jet’s sudden turnaround over central Virginia.
“It’s just a biohazard issue,” the pilot said. “We had a passenger who had diarrhea all the way through the airplane so they want us to come back to Atlanta.”
The audio was posted to X, formerly Twitter, along with an image of the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) flight strip confirming the reason for the U-turn.
Delta Airlines blamed an “onboard medical issue”.
“Our teams worked as quickly and safely as possible to get our customers to their final destination. We sincerely apologize to our customers for the delay and inconvenience to their travel plans,” it said.
The incident came a week after Air Canada apologized to two passengers who were booted from a flight from Seattle to Montreal because they complained about being made to sit in seats covered in vomit.
