Vomit: Couple Finds Full Barf Bag in Seat-Back Pocket on Flight

By Jessica Coen  |  October 1, 2015 | 5:05pm
In Depth

From the check-in counter to the cockpit, the tarmac to the cabin, airline employees work hard. These jobs are pretty thankless, but this lack of consistent, warm-n-fuzzy emotional fulfillment is not grounds for failing to carry out one’s responsibilities. Especially if those responsibilities involve bodily fluids.

A Sacramento couple tells local CBS that their Hawaiian honeymoon ended a special freebie on their United flight: not complimentary pretzels or peanuts (this is United, after all), but a full barf bag tucked into the seat-back pocket and concealed by a blanket.

To the passenger who puked in-flight and failed to hand the bag over to a flight attendant: go to hell. Just go right now, seriously, before you do any more damage. And to the post-flight cleanup crew who failed to notice an entire blanket stuffed into a narrow seat-back pocket: what is wrong with you?

The incident is stomach-turning (no pun intended), but it gets worse with more details:

While handing it to the United Airlines flight attendant, Janet says the vomit got on both her and her husband’s clothes. She says the flight attendant offered to move them, although she says the smell was on their clothes for the full flight.

This is the stuff of nightmares. United doesn’t fly direct to Sacramento from any Hawaiian airports; they go through Los Angeles or San Francisco and those flights are no less than five hours. Five hours of smelling like someone else’s puke.

After CBS Sacramento contacted the airline, the couple was given a $300 voucher towards a United flight, which is only useful if they’re willing to fly with the airline again (doubtful). A spokesperson for United apologized, astutely noting, “Our cleaners apparently failed to clean all of the seatback pockets.” No fucking shit.

United’s spanking-new CEO is on an apology tour right now, acknowledging that the airline has a lot of work to do, though it’s doubtful he realizes just how repulsive that work is.

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Image via Shutterstock.

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