A cockroach infestation, which was discovered in the luggage hold of a Royal Air Maroc plane that had just landed in Manchester following a three-hour flight from Casablanca, has left passengers without their bags for days.
The flight landed in Manchester on August 15, but upon opening one of the cargo holds of the Boeing 737, baggage handlers discovered cockroaches scurrying around the bags.
Passengers onboard Royal Air Maroc flight AT818 told the Independent that the plane landed for a few minutes at around 5:20 p.m. last Thursday, but after waiting in the baggage reclaim hall for nearly two hours with no sign of their luggage appearing on the carousel, they knew something was amiss.
It was at this point that they found out that they weren’t going to be reunited with their bags despite the fact that they had arrived in Manchester.
The third-party baggage handling company, Swissport, had determined that its baggage handlers couldn’t remove the bags from the plane due to health and safety reasons, so the cargo hold was locked back up with all the bags still inside.
Thankfully, only one of the cargo holds was affected so some passengers did eventually get their bags returned the same evening but everyone else was instructed to go home, while their bags flew all the way back to Casablanca.
Since arriving in Morrocco, the bags have been unloaded, and the 15-year-old plane (registration: CN-ROS) was even returned to service just a few hours later for a flight to the Nigerian capital, Abuja.
But the passengers on the Manchester flight are yet to receive news of when they should expect to receive their bags and some passengers say that Apple AirTag’s hidden inside their luggage show that they are still sitting inside Casablanca’s Mohammed V International Airport.
How the cockroach infestation came about remains a mystery, although creepy crawlies hitching a ride on airplane isn’t all that uncommon.
Last month, a passenger on a United Airlines jet captured a video of a giant cockroach scurrying across the cabin wall while a recent domestic flight was boarding passengers.
Back in 2021, a group of British Airways cabin crew even uploaded a video onto social media of a cockroach crawling around the galley area on a flight from New York JFK to London.
