Short of actual emergencies, an overflowing toilet is the last thing anyone wants to experience when on a flight across the ocean.
But that is precisely what happened on a United Airlines (UAL) plane going from Frankfurt to San Francisco on March 29 — a situation so smelly that the plane had to turn back around despite being already a few hours into the journey.
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As first reported by German tabloid newspaper Bild, passengers aboard the Boeing 777 (BA) plane had initially started complaining of a foul-smelling odor in the cabin. Flight attendants went into the lavatory and discovered that the tank of one of the toilets had overflowed and was slowly seeping into the cabin.
Anti-smoking and seatbelt signs are seen in a photo of an airplane cabin.
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Airline calls overflowing toilet a ‘maintenance issue’
After seeing if they could resolve the situation in the air, air crew alerted the pilot that the breakdown was unsalvageable and the plane turned back around almost three hours into the flight.
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United, in turn, called it a “maintenance issue” that required diversion. As the plane had left in the afternoon and there were not many available flights remaining, most passengers aboard the 300-person aircraft had to wait until the next day to be rebooked and were offered accommodation in nearby hotels.
“United Flight 59 returned to Frankfurt following a maintenance issue with one of the aircraft’s lavatories,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to the press.
This has happened before (some other weird mid-flight lavatory incidents)
A similar incident occurred in September 2023 on a Delta Air Lines (DAL) flight from Atlanta to Spain’s Barcelona.
“We’ve had a passenger who’s had diarrhea all the way through the airplane, so they want us to come back to Atlanta,” the pilot is heard saying in the overheard announcement later shared on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter by one of the passengers on the flight. The plane was already flying over Virginia but ended up turning back around to Atlanta.
Delta later told media outlets that there was a “medical issue” but that the cleaning team in Atlanta “worked as quickly and safely as possible to thoroughly clean the airplane and get our customers to their final destination.”
The passengers waited in the airport as the cleaning crew rushed to fix the issue and clean the plane in order to get travelers on the same flight back that night and avoid having to rebook them on different flights the next day
A month later, an EasyJet (EJTTF) flight from Spain’s Tenerife to London failed to take off due to another bathroom incident.
Traveler Kitty Streek posted a video of a pilot making an overhead announcement that one of the passengers “found it rather exciting to defecate [on the floor of] the front toilet” and that as a result they were all “now staying the night here” and would fly back tomorrow morning (loud groans are also heard spreading throughout the cabin.)
Streek also said that they had been waiting for three hours in a foul-smelling cabin for information on what would happen next until the flight finally ended up being canceled.
