Airline passenger finds plane floor soaked in blood

20.07.2023 - 12:15 / edition.cnn.com

Pondering on the cleanliness of airplanes is not something most of us like to think about when flying.

But while you might think your neighbor using a sick bag is as bad as things can get, one man was confronted by bodily fluids of a different kind when he found his feet on an airplane carpet still wet with a previous passenger’s blood and diarrhea.

Habib Battah was flying from Paris to Toronto on Air France on June 30 when he noticed a strange smell coming from the footwell under his and his wife’s seats shortly after takeoff.

“It smelled like manure,” he told CNN.

The pair were traveling on the Boeing 777 with their two cats – each in a separate carrier, in the footwell in front of the couple. They were moving temporarily from Lebanon to the US, where Battah, a Beirut-based journalist, will spend a stint as a university lecturer.

“It was our first time traveling with the cats, and I was thinking, ‘Oh god, they’ve had an accident, I’m so embarrassed.’

“Then I thought, maybe it’s someone’s body odor. I was sniffing and sniffing, then said, let me get the cats out.”

He crouched on the floor to check on the animals on his hands and knees. “I looked at the cats – the poor cats were totally fine,” he says.

But what he did notice beneath the cat carriers was a wet stain on the floor – about 20 inches long and wide, he says. He flagged down a passing flight attendant.

“I said it smells like merde – s**t. She handed me wet wipes. I started wiping and it was red – blood red. And it kept coming up red. I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ I just wanted to see what it was. After a while, one of the flight attendants said, ‘You’d better go wash your hands, and here are some gloves.’”

As Battah was cleaning, the flight attendant had passed the message on to her coworkers, and the captain was radioing Paris, asking what on earth was the blood red stain under seats 30A and 30B.

The news came back from Air France HQ: it was human blood. The day before, on a Paris -Boston flight, a male passenger had suffered what Battah says the crew called a “hemorrhage.”

The passenger had survived, and the captain of that flight had requested that the area be cleaned for the aircraft’s next flight back to Paris – but seemingly the cleaners had forgotten about the floor.

“I didn’t know it was blood until a flight attendant said, casually, ‘Oh, we heard another passenger had a hemorrhage’,” says Battah. “Then I noticed the cat carrier was stained as well.” The blood had soaked through to the carrier, which doubles as a backpack.

In a frenzy, he wanted to clean the bag – the cat still inside it. He moved to the galley area to keep cleaning, “trying to furiously get rid of this awfulness. I used a whole