A reader on Delta Air lines flight 800 from Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles on Sunday had a front row seat to a large dalmatian experiencing bowel issues throughout the six hour journey. As he explains,
[O]n the flight and the dog got sick and had diarrhea multiple times during the 6 hour flight. The cabin smelled awful the entire time. Once we landed in Los Angeles, the dog continued to get sick the entire way up the jetway.
Passengers in the area around the dalmatian were told they would receive 4,000 SkyMiles for the inconvenience.
The passenger was connecting in Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Delta flight 1696 – scheduled to be operated by the same aircraft. He was told by Delta agents that “they were not going to switch planes.” Several passengers from his Fort Lauderdale flight were connecting to Las Vegas and rebooked onto a flight six hours later to avoid the occurrence aircraft, registration N507DZ.
In fact, they delayed the onward Delta flight 1696 to las Vegas by about 1 hour 38 minutes to replace the aircraft for that segment, and the original plane sat in Los Angeles – presumably for a lot of cleaning.
Customer service was willing to extend an additional 5,000 miles – for a total of 9,000 – though that’s in part due to the delay, which itself is an admission on Delta’s part that the plane passengers flew on wasn’t capable of providing sanitary air service. It doesn’t just fall short of Delta’s brand promise that they market, it falls short of basic standards for transportation. A full refund would be more appropriate.
Delta, famous for the diarrhea plane about a year ago, had a first class passenger this past summer who had a “poop accident” and insisted that a flight attendant clean it up.
In the fall, American Airlines passengers had to endure the stench of similar dog droppings for their entire flight. Despite a crackdown on fake service animals, there are still plenty of them around, and causing problems too – like the one who caused my Delta flight to turn around at Thanksgiving.