A Delta flight was forced to turn around after a passenger on board suffered diarrhea “the entire journey.”
The flight from Atlanta to Barcelona was two hours into the trip on Friday night when the pilot asked if he could turn around.
In a video clip of LiveATC.composted on X (formerly known as Twitter), one of the pilots is heard confirming the incident to air traffic control, saying: “It’s a biohazard issue, we had a passenger who had diarrhea the entire flight of the plane, so they want us to go back to Atlanta.”
Flight 194 had to decisively turn around to return to its departure destination, as the crew considered that continuing the trip posed a “biological risk.”
The plane arrived back at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport at 10:40 p.m. to clean up diarrhea from the plane.
More than five hours later, at 3 in the morning, the plane left again for Barcelona for an eight-hour flight.
An X user commented on the video and stated that both he and his wife were traveling on that flight. He said: “Both my wife and I were on the flight. It was a disaster. The pilots made the right decision to turn around. The ground staff ripped out the carpet and put a new one. Given the circumstances, the ground staff made a great job, together with the assistants and the pilots”.
FAA flight strip that relayed crews details of the incident on board
(Twitter)
Another user too He heard stories from his companion traveling to Barcelona that day, who described the scene as “pretty bad.”
He recounted: “It was all over the hall, it smelled horrible. The vanilla-scented disinfectant they used just made it smell like vanilla sour. When the plane landed, they cleaned it down. They didn’t come out until around 2: 30 in the morning.”
It is unknown if the passenger with the medical problem returned to the flight bound for Spain after the diversion.
Delta Air Lines, without going into details, responded to the situation, saying: “Our teams worked as quickly and safely as possible to thoroughly clean the plane and get our customers to their final destination. We sincerely apologize to our customers for the delay and disruption to their travel plans,” Delta wrote in a statement.
Last week, 11 passengers and crew members had to be hospitalized after suffering severe turbulence on a Delta flight from Milan to Atlanta, the company said.
