I do not mean to regurgitate a story which was covered in this article written by Gary Leff of View From The Wing; but I thought I would throw up this account of a family who sat aboard an airplane where the results of the reverse peristalsis of someone was found on the bags of Scott Shirley and his wife after they stored them under the seats in front of them.
Although United Airlines — which operated the flight in question on Sunday, April 12, 2015 — offered to switch them to a flight scheduled to depart the next day from Orlando, they decided to stay in their retched seats and stomach the flight because the wife of Scott Shirley was required to be at work the next day.
Rather than heaving up cleaning supplies and scrubbing the wet vomit off of the seats, members of the flight crew instead offered blankets — which in and of itself is enough to cause someone to lose it — as the aircraft hurled them to their intended destination of the District of Columbia.
A claim was later filed at the airport for the airline to cough up enough compensation to cover the damage to their bags.
This official statement from a spokesperson of United Airlines blows chunks, in my opinion:
The situation Mr. Shirley described is certainly one that we wish no customer experiences, as our cleaners did not fully clean the seat area prior to departure. We offered them an alternate flight, but they decided to remain onboard. Our agents did the best they could in the short time they had to accommodate Mr. Shirley and keep the flight on time. We’re reaching out to apologize for his experience.
To bring up an obvious point, it would seem to me that the fault rests in the bowels of United Airlines, as this incident could certainly have been handled better; although I do not know the circumstances of just how important it was for the wife of Scott Shirley to return to work the next day — perhaps for an important meeting which would have been next to impossible to postpone — or whether or not the airplane was completely full. There is not enough information to completely digest the facts in this incident; but I do believe that a maintenance crew should have been brought aboard to clean up the sickening mess…
…and I do ponder how well the airplanes are cleaned at all if the vomit underneath the seats was not noticed. Would you be aching for an answer to that thought? It is enough to cause someone to double over and barf — which, apparently, is what happened in the first place.
I thought this story might have been a gag at first; but sadly, it appears to be true — and I would not be surprised if all parties concerned would prefer to purge this incident from their memories rather than have it spew out all over the media…
