This is just too disgusting to imagine. I pity the passengers who had to endure this.
DALLAS – Continental Airlines Inc. is apologizing to its customers for “poor conditions” aboard a trans-Atlantic flight where one passenger described sewage spilling down the aisle from a lavatory.
“I’ve never felt so offended in all my life,” passenger Collin Brock of Washington state told Seattle’s KING-TV. “I felt like I had been physically abused and neglected. I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven hours.”
Source: MSNBC.com
Update: Dana over at the New York Metroblog was on that flight, and needless to say, she wasn’t pleased.
It turns out that the culprit was a latex glove flushed down the toilet, amidst all the signs NOT to flush any foreign object (apart from the usual foreign objects that’s supposed to go down the toilet).
One of the passengers revealed that he was given a $500 voucher, which he said he’d probably never use. A PR exec lauds Continental for offering the vouchers, saying it’s the right move.
“In this case, one of the few things they can do is let people fly again,” he said, “on a plane with a potty that works.”
If I was one of the passengers who had to endure that, I’d probably be very wary about flying Continental again. According to the article, the company handling the airline’s ground crew may the be one at fault, not the airline.
However, after reading Dana’s, I’ve changed my opinion. Her account of what happened is really painful.
So here we are on an 8 hour transatlantic flight with one semi-functional bathroom and they start serving food and drink. I had two bloody mary’s hoping that the sodium levels would make me retain water. My boyfriend and I both refrained from eating or drinking much of anything–a real bummer when you paid for first class and all that good food and alcohol that comes with it. Everyone on the flight was told to “limit their consumption” and to “control what comes out on the other end” We heard that in the coach cabin that sewage backed up from the toilets and started flowing down the aisles. We didn’t see that but we certainly smelled it–that does explain the ungodly odor we were forced to endure for the next 8 hours. Any why all the coach passegners were hanging out in First Class.
After enduring all that, Dana only got “a voucher for one free drink the next time we fly with them!” Interesting…that guy on the MSNBC article got a $500 voucher. It turns out they started offering the $500 vouchers AFTER the complaints they received. Hmmmm. I really doubt those people (and the people they know) will ever fly again with an airline with such poor customer service. I don’t think I will.
What would YOU do?
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