An easyJet flight never made it in the air after a passenger decided to sh*t on the floor.
via People:
Before the Sunday flight was canceled, it had already been delayed several hours, according to passenger Kitty Streek, who shared a video of the pilot announcing the cancellation on X (formerly known as Twitter).
In the clip, the pilot announced that someone on board had defecated in the plane’s front toilet. “So we’re now staying the night here,” he said, a statement that was met with a collective groan from the flight’s already exasperated passengers.
Word that someone had pooped on the bathroom floor seemingly spread quickly, as one passenger could be heard in the clip saying, “Who s— on the floor? No way.”
Streek — who criticized easyJet in the caption of her video — also spoke to CNN about her experience with the flight from Tenerife, a Spanish island, to London Gatwick Airport, calling it “very frustrating.”
“We obviously can’t prove whether the person simply had an accident or if they had done this out of anger for the delayed flight, but it was hard not to be angry either way,” the London resident told the news outlet.
“Nobody wants to be stranded in another country,” she added.
Another passenger of the canceled flight, Aaran Gedhu, also spoke to CNN about the Sunday incident.
According to Gedhu, the scheduled plane was swapped for a smaller aircraft before boarding began, and some passengers were turned away at the gate as a result. Those who were permitted to board did so two hours after they were scheduled to depart, and waited in their seats for another hour as bags were removed from the plane because it was overweight.
The delayed, tightly-packed flight had an atmosphere of “suspense and anger,” Gedhu told CNN, adding that it did not help that easyJet planes are already uncomfortable and short on leg space.
“So everyone was just a bit tense,” he said. “Then, the pilot finally gave the all-clear, and said that it will be about 20 minutes until departure. And that’s when the incident happened with the defecation.”
After two passengers visited the front bathroom, word spread that someone had pooped on the bathroom floor, he recalled. Shortly after, an unpleasant stench seemingly confirmed the rumor.
Gedhu chalked the poop fiasco up to an “accident,” and said that despite emotions running high, “everyone was being polite to each other.”
“There was no fighting amongst the passengers,” he told CNN.
“It was just a very uncomfortable experience,” he continued. “Obviously, the plane was in an unsanitary state. So they had to get external cleaners out from the airport to clean it. So that’s when the stairs reconnected, and the cleaners came on to deep-clean the flooring.”
While cleaners remedied the bathroom situation, Gedhu said he and the other easyJet passengers remained seated. Then, the pilot made the announcement that was captured on video by Streek.
After the flight was officially canceled, passengers had to wait another half-hour before they could deplane, Gedhu told CNN, adding that he was put up in a hotel overnight and — as the pilot promised — boarded a “rescue” flight the next day.
In a statement shared with CNN, easyJet said that the flight was canceled for “additional cleaning,” and the delays prior to the fecal incident happened due to “safety reasons.”
“Some bags were offloaded to be carried on the next available flight for safety reasons, due to the aircraft being overweight,” the airline said in the statement, adding that the flight was “subsequently delayed overnight due to the aircraft requiring additional cleaning.”
Elsewhere in the statement, easyJet said it was unable to provide hotel accommodation for all customers due to limited availability. The airline said it “advised any customers who booked their own that they will be reimbursed.”
“The safety and well-being of our customers and crew is easyJet’s highest priority and while this was outside of our control we would like to apologise to customers for the inconvenience caused,” the statement read.
A month before the easyJet fecal fiasco, a different defecation incident made headlines.
In September, a Delta flight from Atlanta to Barcelona, Spain, was cut short when it returned to the airport after a passenger suffered a case of severe diarrhea.
In an audio clip of an emergency call to dispatchers, the pilot said, “It’s just a biohazard issue… we’ve had a passenger who had diarrhea all the way through the airplane, so they want us to come back to Atlanta.”
Following the incident, Delta confirmed to PEOPLE in a statement that there had been a “medical issue” on board.
“Our teams worked as quickly and safely as possible to thoroughly clean the airplane and get our customers to their final destination,” the statement read. “We sincerely apologize to our customers for the delay and inconvenience to their travel plans.”
Is it just us, or do people seem to be sh*tting on planes more frequently these days?
