A Delta Air Lines flight traveling from Atlanta to Barcelona on Friday night had to change course and return to the departure airport due to a passenger experiencing a bout of diarrhea.
The Airbus A350 departed as scheduled on the evening of September 1st with 336 passengers on board; however, it was compelled to reverse its course over central Virginia.
“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.
According to Delta, the flight was delayed by just over eight hours before safely landing in Barcelona 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.”
This summer has seen numerous instances of bodily fluids interfering with passengers’ travel experiences. This week Air Canada apologized for a situation in which two passengers were told to sit in seats that had not been thoroughly cleaned and had previously been contaminated with vomit.
The event took place on an aircraft from Las Vegas to Montreal on August 26.
And on June 30, a customer on an Air France flight from Paris to Toronto discovered that the footwell of his seat was still soaked with the blood and diarrhea of a previous passenger.
Habib Battah told CNN that he smelled something odd, “like manure,” but when he informed a flight attendant, he was given wet wipes and forced to clean the area himself before being offered blankets from business class to soak up the waste. For the next seven hours, “we had to sit there and smell the blood,” he said.