Forget snakes on a plane! A United flight experienced a creepy, crawly situation that left passengers bugging out.
“On the plane from Venice to New York, when a large, fat ant walks over my pillow,”Charlotte Burns wrote in a Twitter threadthat went on to document her ant-filled, 9-hour journey. “Minutes later, another fat little bug hurries over the television screen. Then another one—on my arm!”
After she spotted the first few insects and alerted the crew, she says, flight attendants asked if she could wait until after take off to have her seat inspected. When she reported more bugs had appeared once airborne, she writes that she was asked to wait until after the meal service, which was just beginning.
At one point, a fellow passenger in the center row of seats on the transatlantic flight said he had seen a “parade” of ants in an overhead bin in the row in front of Burns.
She and the other passenger, who she dubbed “middle aisle guy” in her Twitter saga, stood up as a flight attendant came through to try and take care of the situation.
“Me and the middle aisle guy are standing up like we are the ant enforcers while the senior cabin crew guy rocks up, armed with… a flashlight and a wet cloth. Sure, ant-mageddon might be undone with a lemony rag, why not,” she writes.
Eventually, the group discovered the source of the bugs as the carry-on bag of another passenger. The crew member investigating initially couldn’t see anything in the bin while wielding a flashlight, but, Burns says, at her insistence, he lifted up the bag and found what they were looking for:
“Me and middle aisle guy say please take the bags out and check beneath. He does. ANTS! Ants lie beneath,” she recounts.
The crew member woke the sleeping owner of the bag, inspected it, and found it was indeed full of live ants that, in Burns’s depiction “spill out.”
“The guy in front pulls down his case (which btw isn’t zipped shut, as middle aisle guy notes to me in an aside),” she writes, “and ants ants ants spill out, running in every which direction.”
Burns says she was offered “three kinds of white wine” for her troubles and other passengers were “unflappable” when it came to the bugs. In a statement to PEOPLE, a representative for United noted the ants were “contained to a limited area of the cabin.”
Burns also alleges that another flight attendant asked her if she was “going to do anything” seemingly in retaliation against the man whose bag contained the bugs. The crew member, Burns says, stated that the bugs “came from his bag. They weren’t on the plane.”
United has had its fair share of passenger grievances aired on social media. In January, a medical emergency onboard a Hong Kong-bound flightcaused passengers to be stranded in freezing coldfor 16 hours. That same month, a passenger announced that he was suing the airline over what he alleges was a coverup of anincident in which a pilot was almost “sucked out”of the plane.
source: people.com
