Delta Air Lines says thousands of international passengers were only offered a vegetarian meal option on Wednesday after an Amsterdam-bound plane was forced to divert on Tuesday night because the passengers and crew had been served spoiled food.
A spokesperson for the embattled carrier said it had taken the decision only to serve vegetarian pasta dishes in its international Main Cabin out of an ‘abundance of caution’ after paramedics rushed to help sickened travelers from the Detroit to Amsterdam flight.
On Tuesday night, flight DL136 departed Detroit for what should have been a routine seven-hour flight across the Atlantic. But around two and a half hours into the flight, just before the plane was about to cross the ocean, the pilots decided to suddenly turn back and divert to New York JFK.
It turns out that hundreds of passengers and the crew had been served a mouldy and spoiled chicken dish, and the pilots were scared that both they and the passengers would become violently sick while still flying to Amsterdam.
Flight attendants only discovered that something was wrong after serving most of the meals when a passenger alerted them to the issue.
Now, Delta’s head of inflight service Ash Dhokte is telling flight attendants that they are the “last line of defense” and has implored them to closely examine meals before serving them to passengers.
Dhokte says “immediate corrective actions have been implemented to avoid recurrence”, and at least 75 flights departed on Wednesday without any meat options in the Main Cabin.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Delta apologized to affected passengers, saying: “This is not the service Delta is known for, and we sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and delay in their travels.”
In May, around 70 passengers on a Condor Airways flight from Maritius to Frankfurt were struck down with a mystery illness after consuming an inflight meal. Around a quarter of the passengers onboard the flight reported gruesome gastrointestinal problems, but Condor said there was no evidence that the food it served them during the flight was to blame.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) certain types of food poisoning, such as Staph, can start to cause nasty symptoms like nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, and diarrhoea in as little as 30 minutes after consuming contaminated food.
