Sewage On a Plane

Airline apologizes for sewage on plane

Thu Jun 21, 12:59 PM ET
DALLAS - Continental Airlines Inc. is apologizing to its customers for "poor conditions" aboard a transatlantic 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."
Continental spokesman Dave Messing on Thursday confirmed that there had been a problem with the plane's lavatory during the flight.
Flight 71, with 168 passengers on board, had taken off June 13 from Amsterdam bound for Newark, N.J., but made an overnight stop in Shannon, Ireland, to fix the lavatory problem, Messing said.
He said everything appeared to have been fixed before the plane took off again for Newark the next day, renamed Flight 1970, but then "the problem developed again."
After the plane landed in Newark, airline employees determined the problem was caused by someone flushing latex gloves down the toilet — despite signs that warn not to discard foreign objects into the system, Messing said.
"We deeply regret the serious inconvenience to our customers and are apologizing to them and compensating them for the poor conditions on the flight as well as the diversion and delay," he wrote in a statement from the Houston-based carrier.
Continental is compensating passengers with travel vouchers, Messing said. He declined to say how much the vouchers were worth.
Brock told KING-TV he was offered a $500 voucher. He said he wasn't sure he would ever use it.



I was reading this article and couldn't help but be appalled because, really even though we love flying and would fly to our jobs if we could, being scrunched in those little seats with those pitiful bags of snacks (and now you have to PAY FOR YOUR OWN MEAL) and being too hot or too cold and having delays and having to sit in the airport for hours when there is a thunderstorm at O'Hare that delays your flight for hours is not all that wonderful. But all that PALES in comparison to having to fly with poo in the aisle beside you. That would be...bad. But here's what really concerns me. What seriously concerns me.



They discovered the problem was caused by a clog in the toilet caused by someone flushing a pair of latex gloves. Really? Someone flushed...some latex gloves...in the airplane restroom.



Think about this. Really think about it. What in the world were they doing with latex gloves on? Or even taking them on the plane? Aside from sort of sexual use which, really, ewwww. Were they so anal (no pun intended, you sicko) they had to clean the bathroom before using it? Was there some Comet found in the toilet as well? Were they thinking there would be some sort of medical emergency on board, like, well, I don't know, someone going into labor or needing an immediate proctological exam? And they could yell, "Wait! I am totally ready for this! I HAVE my latex gloves with me! Move out of my way!". Maybe they were planning to put little faces on the gloves with a marker and blow them up to make a little puppet show for the children in the seat behind them. Or maybe they just thought they would put them down the toilet, it would overflow and sewage would overrun the plane.

Because they REALLY like that smell.