United passengers describe being stuck on a hot plane for 7 hours with no food, water, or AC

05.08.2023 - 10:35 / insider.com / Airlines

United Airlines passengers described being trapped on their plane for seven hours on the runway in bleak conditions, before the flight was canceled.

Passengers on flight UA40 were expecting to fly from Newark to Rome on July 3, but technical problems left the plane stuck at the airport. Per the tracking site FlightAware, the service was canceled at 2:23 a.m. on July 4.

Instead, they said, they were left waiting without food or water as temperatures on the Boeing 787 hit 80 degrees because the air conditioning wasn't on.

Although the incident was in July, it didn't come to public attention until much later, after passengers posted on social media, spoke to news outlets about it, and the Department of Transport announced an investigation.

A TikTok video posted on July 17 showed the scene just after the passengers were let off. [Can you embed the TikTok pls]

It was posted by a passenger, Bianca Dragone, who recorded another, Christina Ieronimo, saying that somebody had fainted due to the heat on board.

"There's children back there, and a girl had a panic attack and passed out – so that was a health concern," Ieronimo said.

"We had elderly people, we had babies, we have pregnant women – not even water, you didn't even pass around water," she said to a United employee.

"Nobody listened to me, I'm critical care nurse and that was not good."

"We were trapped on that plane for seven hours in 70-plus heat, treated like animals."

Newsweek reported earlier this United delayed the flight repeatedly before canceling it, citing an unspecified "technical issue."

Speaking to Newsweek, Dragone said the plane reached a "truly unbearable" 80 degrees and said that she too was aware of someone passing out "due to heat exhaustion."

Ieronimo said in a follow-up interview with CBS7 that airline staff hadn't offered passengers food or water – and one flight attendant responded "What do you want me to do?" when she raised her concerns.

United did not immediately reply to Insider's request for comment, sent outside normal working hours.

Both the airline and the US Department of Transport told CBS7 they would investigate what happened.