Delta has taken crappy service to a whole new level.
A passenger was shocked when he stepped into a large pile of dog poop aboard an Atlanta-to-Miami flight– and was offered only paper towels and a miniature bottle of gin to clean it up.
“I sit in my seat and I immediately smell something, and I thought, ‘Not another flight that smells bad,’” Matthew Meehan of Bay City, Michigan, told Yahoo Lifestyle of last Thursday’s flight from hell.
“I realized the person next to me also had their nose covered,” he continued. “And then I went to take my charger out, bent down completely to charge my phone and realized it’s not just a smell, it’s actually feces and it’s all over the back of my legs, it’s all over the floor, all over the wall of the plane.”
He and the fellow flier rushed over to the front of the plane to notify the flight attendants, whose response to the biohazard left him stunned.
“The flight crew said, ‘Are you kidding me? We turned that in. I can’t believe they didn’t clean it.’ They knew it was there,” said Meehan, a top-tier Diamond member of Delta’s Medallion program, which the airline says “provides opportunities to fly more comfortably.”
“The Delta representative that spoke with me after the fact told me their protocol is to have a biohazard kit onboard,” he said.
“The fact that they either didn’t take it down and offer me something from it to clean myself properly or it was absent completely from the plane broke protocol either way. They said they didn’t have one.”
Instead of calling the gate and asking for sanitizing materials, Meehan alleges that the flight attendant gave him two paper towels and a miniature bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin to clean himself with.
“It got all over my bare ankles,” he said. “They didn’t give me gloves. I had to take my pants off because it’s on the back of my pants, so feces, at this point, is transferring to my hands, with no kind of sanitizing solution to be able to clean anything with — and only one tiny bottle of gin.”
When he left the lavatory, to his dismay, passengers continued boarding the poop-covered aircraft, he said.
When Meehan asked the flight crew for an explanation, he said they told him that cleaning the mess wasn’t their responsibility and that they were busy getting ready for departure.
“If you want, you can get off the plane and talk to somebody,” he said he was told.
The gate agent called a manager, whom Meehan described as confrontational.
“I tell her what happened and she said, ‘If the cleaning crew didn’t do their job, that’s not my problem. What do you want me to do about it?’” Meehan said.
“Very confrontational, like, so what? So I said, ‘Can we get that cleaned up so I can sit down?’ So she says, ‘Sir, it’s almost time for that plane to leave. You can sit in your seat or you can be left behind.’”
By this point, other passengers stood in protest and demanded a thorough cleaning, he said, so the manager sent over someone with paper towels.
“To my knowledge, they did not use any kind of sanitizing solution, and I was supposed to be OK with that because she quote unquote, cleaned it,” he said.
“We didn’t know if it was a person who’d gotten sick, an animal who’d gotten sick. … Originally, the flight crew said that it was a German shepherd. And then the gate agent said in his paperwork that it was an older man who got sick upon landing.”
The airline later told him a golden retriever puppy dropped the deuce.
Meehan said he had to be somewhere in the morning and could not afford to deplane — so he had no choice but to “fester in feces” for a couple of malodorous hours.
“It felt like I was an animal tied up, forced to lay in their own feces that you see sometimes in PETA videos,” he said. “It was dehumanizing to be spoken to like that, demanded to sit in a seat full of feces with no care. They care more about getting a plane out on time than the safety and health of the passengers on the plane.”
Since the flight was overbooked, he couldn’t even move to another seat.
“So we sat there during the entire flight, my row, the rows around me, it still smelled horrific. There was still feces caked into the carpet,” he lamented.
Meehan posted his sickening account on social media.
“I’m NOT HAPPY DELTA! SICK,” he wrote on Facebook. “Is this even legal? This is a HEALTH CODE VIOLATION!”
In a statement, Delta said Flight 1949 “was boarded before cleaning was completed following an incident from a previous flight with an ill service animal.”
“Delta apologizes to customers impacted by the incident and has reached out to make it right, offering a refund and additional compensation. The safety and health of our customers and employees is our top priority, and we are conducting a full investigation while following up with the right teams to prevent this from happening again,” the airline said.
Delta also said the plane was taken out of service to be “deep cleaned and disinfected” in Miami.
The carrier offered Meehan 50,000 miles in compensation.
“That’s what I’m worth to them? 50,000 miles? After putting my health at risk along with everyone else on the plane?” he said.
“I’m a Diamond Medallion and a million-miler,” Meehan added. “If this is how they treat their top tier, I can’t even imagine how they treat people who aren’t part of the SkyMiles program.”
