216 Pound Dad Gets Trapped in Delta Air Lavatory With Screaming 3-Year-Old As Flight Attendants Desperately Try to Unlock Broken Door

A 216-pound man got trapped in a Delta Air Lines lavatory with his distraught three-year-old child for at least 30 minutes during a long-haul flight from Taipei to Seattle after the lock got jammed and the emergency door release seemingly failed.

The incident occurred last month, but details of the embarrassing snafu are only just coming to light after Delta initially offered the family a “measly” 4,000 Skymiles frequent flyer points to compensate them for the trauma.

Got trapped in the lavatory with my 3 year old (for 35min) from Taipei to Seattle, long story.
byu/Intelligent_Yak_640 indelta

Sharing his tale on the popular social media site Reddit, the father explained that after spending a month and a half in Taiwan, his flight home turned into a pretty eventful journey as a litany of issues seemed to plague this flight from hell.

Problems started pretty much after takeoff as turbulence continually disrupted the main meal service, forcing flight attendants to repeatedly pause the service and take their seats as they waited for the flying conditions to get a little smoother.

Around eight hours into the ten-hour flight, the man took his toddler to use the bathroom, and this is when things started to get really bad for the family.

“After utilizing the tiny bathroom, we washed hands, (with soap) and headed out, unlatched the lock, the light turned off but the accordion style door wouldn’t open,” the man explained in his Reddit post.

“I laugh to myself and tried the lock again, light ON, light OFF, OK nothing, door won’t budge. Pushing on the door, I felt barely any flex.”

“We started to get slightly anxious and so instinctually I started knocking hard on the door to get someones attention,” the post continued.

It was, however, the toddler’s quick thinking that eventually got the attention of a flight attendant after he pressed the call button in the lavatory. Although the crew was now aware that someone was in the lavatory, the noise of the plane, along with a screaming toddler, made communication through the jammed door all but impossible.

“I hope in your life, you don’t ever have to try and communicate through a bathroom door mid flight. Between the sound inside the cabin, crying, engines and a pretty secure door, you can barely hear anything,” the man cautioned.

Flight attendants initially thought the three-year-old was trapped in the lavatory alone and summoned the mother, who rushed to the cubicle only to realize that her partner was also in the lavatory.

At this point, she reassures the flight attendants that her child isn’t in the lavatory alone and goes back to her seat, thinking everything was under control. It was only after the man resorted to tearing a rubber strip from around the lavatory door that he could heard and was able to tell the crew they were trapped.

The crew initially tried to release the door by using a metal knife, while the pilots reportedly went back and forth with Delta’s maintenance team in Atlanta to try and work out how to release the jammed lavatory door.

After repeatedly rocking the door back and forth, the lock eventually popped open, and the door flung open, coming off its tracks in the process. Unsurprisingly, the crew then cordoned off the lavatory to make sure it couldn’t be used again.

Once safely back at home, the man complained to Delta but was disappointed when the airline offered just 4,000 Skymiles as compensation. Only after pushing the carrier did the compensation get bumped up to 15,000 and then 17,000 Skymiles.

In the end, however, the family accepted $200 in future travel vouchers for everyone in the party.

In December 2023, a man got stuck in the lavatory of another Delta plane during a flight to New Orleans. In that case, the flight attendants struggled to release the door, and the man only eventually got out when a pilot ended up kicking the door down.

Both incidents occurred with space-saving lavatories that utilize bi-fold or concertina doors that push open from the outside and pull open from the inside. These doors usually have an emergency door release that releases the entire door panel from its track, regardless of whether it is locked.