Traveller finds pool of blood and feces next to his seat on Canada-bound flight
It’s common knowledge that airplanes are not the cleanest spaces, but one passenger recently experienced a nightmare scenario when he came in contact with bodily fluids – including blood and feces – on his flight.
Habib Battah was on an Air France flight from Paris to Toronto on June 30 when he started smelling something funky.
And he wrote a thread on Twitter detailing the nightmare.
I've seen a few things in my life, but the horrific blood-soaked carpet on my @airfrance plane yesterday was another level! An hour into the transatlantic flight from Paris to Toronto, I kept smelling something gross and couldn't figure it out. Until I got up and looked down…(1 pic.twitter.com/if919aLlO8
— Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023
Battah, an independent journalist, was travelling with his wife and two cats as they were moving temporarily from Beirut to the US, where he got a job as a university professor.
At first, Battah thought the smell could be coming from his cats, placed in two separate carriers under the footwell of his and his wife’s seats.
When he knelt to move the carriers and investigate, he realized the cats did not cause the smell.
At this point, he was on his knees, hands touching the airplane floor, and he noticed that the ground was soaked with some sort of fluid.
Little did he know it was a mix of human blood and feces.
“I pulled up the cat, the cat was clean [and the carrier] was wet,” Battah told Daily Hive, adding that he kept telling one of the air stewardesses it smelled like “merde,” a French expletive for feces.
“They just kind of looked at me with a blank look, and they just said, ‘Well here, have some wet wipes,'” he recounted.
“It came up blood red”
At this point, Battah was still unsure what the substance was.
“Again, I didn’t comprehend the risks of biohazard at that point in time. So I just started wiping it, not knowing what it was,” he said. “And it came up blood red… and I just told [the flight attendant], ‘What is this?'”
He said he pulled up the cat carrier, which was soaked in the fluid.
“So I got up, and my instinct was to get it out, clean it off; I didn’t want to sit there and smell it.”
That’s when Battah said one of the flight attendants told him to wash his hands and gave him a pair of gloves to put on.
I took out my backpack from under the seat and the strap was soaked in blood too. I got on my hands and knees and cleaned for half an hour. The @airfrance staff gave me gloves and more wipes. Then they casually noted a passenger had hemorrhaged on a flight before ours. (3 pic.twitter.com/yVW7n9w0MY
— Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023
Battah said at this point, things were getting hectic. He was dealing with a soiled cat carrier, he had come into contact with an unknown fluid that smelled awful, and the flight attendants weren’t providing him with many details, and his fellow passengers were watching on.
He was instructed by flight staff to go to the galley to clean up. Eventually, he got word from one of the attendants that a passenger had suffered a “hemorrhage” on the previous flight, meaning that the red fluid he came into contact with was blood.
Battah was in shock and quickly tried to clean up the mess of the carrier and went through the entire pack of wet wipes.
Here I am trying to get the blood off my luggage that it absorbed from the airplane carpet. The @airfrance staff crowded around, shocked because they claimed a cleaning crew had removed the seats after the sick passenger incident, but apparently not cleaned the floor. (4 pic.twitter.com/X59rYkvaAW
— Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023
In hindsight, Battah said that “so many things were so wrong” with the entire situation.
“Putting it together now, we just put all that blood in the back of the aircraft. And I did it in the galley. So I was there [in the galley] running blood next to the food.”
He added that the flight attendants were not very helpful, leaving him to deal with the mess.
“They weren’t really taking charge. It [was] kind of like do it yourself.”
No accommodations
No accommodations could be made to move Battah and his wife from their seat because the flight was full.
Instead, Battah said the flight attendants put down a thin blanket to cover up the stain and handed him and his wife two bottles of Evian water.
The rest of the flight was a terrible experience. Battah said he had taken off his shoes at the beginning of the flight, his socks had made contact with the blood, the smell was lingering, and there was only a thin blanket separating them from the bloody mess in front of them.
Three days after the nightmare fight, Air France contacted Battah to let him know why the smell came from the fluid.
It wasn’t just blood; it also contained fecal matter.
The situation doesn’t make sense to Battah and those who have read his now-viral tweets about the incident.
How did the flight cleaning crew not notice the stain or the smell? Why wasn’t the plane thoroughly checked and cleaned after a passenger on the previous flight had experienced a medical incident that involved bodily fluids?
Air France responds
In a statement to Daily Hive, Air France confirmed that a passenger was “unwell on a flight from Paris (CDG) to Boston (BOS)” on June 29 and soiled his seat.”
The airline said that following a satellite call and the crew’s description of the passenger’s wellbeing, SAMU de Paris (the emergency medical service) “did not recommend any specific measures to isolate the passenger or divert the flight.”
Passengers seated near the customer experiencing medical issues were moved “for their own comfort,” and medical teams then assisted the individual upon arrival at Boston Logan Airport.
Air France said that per its procedures, “a complete clean-up of the area was requested upon arrival in Boston, and the row of seats was made unavailable on the return flight.”
As for Battah’s experience, the airline said that the “crew immediately took action to clean the carpet and installed blankets on the ground to avoid further contact with the stain, while assisting the passenger in the cleaning of his belongings, providing him with suitable equipment such as sterile gloves and disinfectant wipes.”
“As the flight was fully booked, it was unfortunately not possible to move the passenger. An internal investigation has been launched to understand the events leading to this situation,” confirmed Air France.
Unanswered questions
For Battah, there are still questions that have gone unanswered by the airline, like its procedures for when there is a biohazard spill.
Daily Hive contacted Air France again, asking if it recognized this as a biohazard spill and for its cleaning procedures, but did not receive a follow-up response.
“Why isn’t there somebody who says, ‘Okay, let’s flag this. Make sure the cleaning crew does a certified hospital cleaning’?'” asked Battah.
“To me, there’s something really missing in this process, [there’s] a structural problem here.”
Compensation
In the days following the incident, Battah said he had filed an official report to Air France.
The airline said it had contacted Battah and offered compensation, which he said was only $500, to account for the Paris to Toronto leg of the flight, and not the trip from Beirut to Paris.
I really hope @airfrance @iata takes this seriously and can tell us if we were exposed to any hazardous medical/bio waste. Chief attendant filed a report, noting sick passenger traveled Thursday from Paris to Boston, so 1 other flight exposed passengers to blood before ours. (6 pic.twitter.com/5ZIKeQO7Tt
— Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023
“First of all, $500 is not the cost of a ticket from Toronto to Paris,” he told Daily Hive. “So it’s definitely not even anywhere near the cost of the flight. It’s maybe a 10 or 20% discount when you include everything…,” he said.
“So [they’re] suggesting a 20% discount for blood and feces.”
Battah said he is also considering legal action against the airline because of the health risks associated with the spill.
“Any medical person that you speak to will tell you blood, especially diarrhea, is a major vector for disease,” he said.
“You know, Air France’s slogan is, ‘Taking elegance to new heights.’ I think they’re taking biohazards to new heights,” he quipped.
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