A passenger on a recent Air India flight from Bengaluru to San Francisco discovered what appeared to be a blade in his inflight meal and he only found the sharp metal object after he had already taken a bite into it.
Taking to social media, Mathures Paul somehow managed to make light of what could have been a dangerous incident, joking that “Air India cuts like a knife”.
“Hiding in its roasted sweet potato and fig chaat was a metal piece that looked like a blade,” Paul said on a post on X (formerly Twitter) which also included a photo of the meal before and after he discovered the blade.
“I got a feel of it only after chewing the grub for a few seconds. Thankfully, no harm was done,” Paul continued. Although Paul escaped unharmed, he questioned what might have happened if the meal had been served to a child.
Air India reached out to Paul shortly after he published his social media post and the airline has since confirmed that the metal object likely originated from Air India’s catering department.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the airline explained: “Air India confirms that a foreign object was found in the meal of a guest aboard one of our flights.”
“After investigation, it has been identified as coming from the vegetable processing machine used at the facilities of our catering partner.”
Last month, a passenger on a United Airlines flight from Sydney to Los Angeles claimed that they discovered a maggot in their inflight meal. Disgustingly, the passenger only realised the maggot was present after taking several bites out of the pasta dish.
Although rare, it’s not unheard of for passengers to find ‘foreign objects’ in their inflight meals. In December 2022, one British Airways passenger even claimed to have found a dental implant in her meal during a flight from London Heathrow to Dubai.
Even that gruesome discovery, however, can’t compete with a SunExpress flight from Ankara, Turkey, to Dusseldorf in July 2022 when a passenger found a severed snake’s head in their breakfast.
