Generally speaking, flying isn’t great. It’s the quickest way to get from, say, Paris to Toronto, but you’re probably not going to have a great time unless you can at least afford business class. And considering how quickly planes get turned around, you can’t exactly expect deep cleaning between flights. But surely, if a passenger bled out in their seat and shit their pants, the airline would at least take the time to clean that up, right? Apparently not.
CNN reports that on June 30, one Air France passenger noticed an awful smell coming from beneath his and his wife’s seats. Since they were travelling with their two cats, he initially thought that one of the cats had had an accident. Which would have been bad enough if it was true, but what he actually found under the seats was so, so much worse. Like never-fly-Air-France-again-and-maybe-get-therapy bad.
When he got down to check on the cats, he realised they were fine. But there was also a large stain on the carpet that was “about 20 inches long and wide.” As it turns out, the cause of the stain was a mix of human blood and diarrhoea.
The good news, if there is any good news in this story, is that it wasn’t coming from a passenger who was actively experiencing a medical emergency. Instead, it reportedly came from a previous passenger who had experienced a medical emergency. The cleaning crew just hadn’t fully cleaned it up.
“I said it smells like merde – shit. She handed me wet wipes. I started wiping and it was red – blood red. And it kept coming up red. I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ I just wanted to see what it was. After a while, one of the flight attendants said, ‘You’d better go wash your hands, and here are some gloves,’” Habib Battah told CNN.
“I didn’t know it was blood until a flight attendant said, casually, ‘Oh, we heard another passenger had a hemorrhage’,” Battah continued. “Then I noticed the cat carrier was stained as well.”
To make things worse, they were reportedly on a full flight and couldn’t change seats. So they had to sit in their original seats for the rest of the flight and just deal with the fact that Air France had left disgusting body fluids there for them to find. But hey, at least they got two bottles of water from the flight attendant, as well as some powder to soak up the blood and blankets for the floor.
“We had to sit there smelling the blood for the next seven hours. The smell of rotten blood is like manure. I’d taken my shoes off at the start of the flight, and there was blood on my socks,” Battah told CNN. Three days later, Air France reportedly told him it wasn’t just blood that smelled like shit. It was actually blood mixed with shit.
“As per procedure in this type of situation, a complete clean-up of the area was requested and the row of seats was made unavailable on the return flight,” Air France said in a statement. “A customer travelling on the next flight from Paris (CDG) to Toronto (YYZ) reported residual traces of blood on the floor, soiling his personal belongings. The crew immediately assisted him in cleaning his belongings, providing him with suitable equipment such as sterile gloves and disinfectant wipes. As the flight was fully booked, it was not possible to move the passenger. An internal investigation has been launched to understand the reasons for this situation.”
The airline also said that it “understands and regrets the inconvenience caused by this situation.”