An American Airlines Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner with as many as 284 passengers on board made an emergency landing in Dublin, Ireland, on Saturday afternoon after six of the eight flight attendants on the service from Rome to Philadelphia reportedly felt ill as the plane started its transatlantic service.
American Airlines flight AA-719 departed Rome Fiumicino International Airport just before 1 pm local time on July 25 for what should have been a routine eight-and-a-half-hour flight across the pond to the carrier’s Philadelphia hub.
Data from the light tracking website Flight Radar 24 shows that the seven-year-old aircraft climbed to a cruising altitude of around 38,000 feet as it tracked over France and over the Atlantic Ocean, before the pilots suddenly turned towards Ireland around three hours into the flight.
The reason given to air traffic control for the sudden diversion was a medical emergency, although the exact details of what kind of medical episode was taking place weren’t immediately revealed.
Sources cited by trusted aviation insider JonNYC on X have, however, reported that six of the flight attendants started to feel dizzy and ill as the plane flew over the Atlantic. Although none of the crew members are believed to have been incapacitated, the pilots decided that the flight couldn’t continue with so many flight attendants feeling ill all at once.
The plane landed safely in Dublin on Saturday afternoon, but with no replacement crew to take the passengers to Philadelphia, and the cause of the illness amongst the flight attendants still a mystery, American Airlines had no other option but to cancel the onward flight.
on this, I'm told– 100% UNCONFIRMED–
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) July 25, 2026
"AA 719. Flight divert after 6 of 9 FA’s felt dizzy / ill."
100% unconfirmed. https://t.co/2uBxohJ0Bn
American Airlines has been contacted for comment, but had not responded by the time of publication.
There are several potential causes for this sudden mass sickness amongst the flight attendants, although some type of ‘toxic’ fume event (a term that the airline industry prefers to call an ‘odor’ event) is the least likely, given that this flight was operated by a Boeing 787.
The Dreamliner is the only commercial passenger aircraft that does not use the so-called ‘bleed air’ system to feed air into the cabin from the outside. The term bleed air is derived from the fact that some of the air being sucked into the engines is then bled into the air conditioning system.
This method of delivering fresh air into the passenger cabin has been criticized as campaigners claim the air can become contaminated with vaporized engine oil or other contaminants from the engine, which can make passengers and crew sick if it is fed into the cabin.
The more likely cause for this diversion is a fault with the air conditioning packs that supply the air into the cabin. If even one of these packs stops working, the levels of oxygen in the cabin can drop to the point that passengers and crew could start feeling the early symptoms of hypoxia.
This wouldn’t necessarily be bad enough to trigger a depressurization emergency, but it would be enough for people to start feeling dizzy, light-headed, and potentially even clumsy and euphoric.
This kind of fault is much more likely to affect flight attendants rather than the passengers because they are up and about, running a busy meal service, meaning their bodies require more oxygen to function normally.
Another potential cause, although highly unusual, could be a chemical leak from a spilt cleaning product. Yes, this sounds oddly specific, but this is exactly what caused a group of American Airlines flight attendants to feel ill shortly after takeoff from London Heathrow during a flight to Philadelphia in October 2018.
Two of the crew members were so badly affected by the smell of the noxious chemicals that they lost consciousness for a short time, leading the pilots to make an emergency diversion to Shannon, Ireland.
American Airlines said the incident was caused by a bottle of industrial cleaning solution known as CH2200D, which had been accidentally left in a toilet by the cleaning crew. When the plane took off, the bottle tipped over, and the solution soaked into the carpet, releasing a noxious vapor that overpowered some of the flight attendants.
Crew missed the container on their mandatory toilet inspection prior to takeoff.