Thursday, July 01, 2010

Maggots are falling (from the overhead bin) like rain!

Yes, I'm riffing off a GWAR song. But with stories like this, it's just too easy:
Maggots falling from an overhead bin from a spoiled container of meat forced a US Airways flight to return to the gate so the bin could be cleaned.

Passenger Donna Adamo said she noticed a couple of flies on the Monday flight when she got to her seat but didn't think much of it. Then, as the plane was taxiing, she heard a passenger behind her causing a commotion and refusing to take her seat.

"Then I heard the word 'maggot' and that kind of got everybody creeped out," she said. "All of a sudden, I felt somebody flick the back of my hair and on the front of me came a maggot, which I flicked off me."

A passenger had the container in a carry-on bag and brought it on Monday's flight heading from Atlanta to Charlotte, N.C., said US Airways spokesman Todd Lehmacher. The pilot announced that they were returning to the gate because of a "minor emergency on board" and the flight attendants told everyone to sit down and be calm, Adamo said.

"I felt like they were crawling all over me because it only takes one maggot to upset your world," she said. "And as they're telling us to stay calm and seated, I see a maggot looking back at me and I'm thinking, 'These are anaerobic, flesh-eating larvae that the flight attendants don't have to sit with.' "

Ick. Just ick.

Of course, the big question I have is why somebody was carrying a container of spoiled, maggot-infested meat in their carry-on luggage to begin with. Or why, given the foul odor that such an item would inevitably give off, nobody detected this person's tainted carry-on baggage at the TSA security checkpoint, at the gate prior to boarding or on the plane itself.

Really, it is a story that is as bizarre as it is disgusting, and I'm wondering if there isn't more to this than what is being reported.

But, as one commenter on the story notes, it does give us a new term: "carrion luggage."

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