Passengers onboard a 12-hour flight to Mexico had a pretty uncomfortable ride after they took off from Amsterdam this weekend. The discomfort wasn’t due to rough air, poor food choices onboard or anything like that, instead it was because the cabin filled with an awful smell thanks to 100 pigs that were loaded into the hold.
A KLM flight from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Mexico City took off with 259 passengers and crew onboard and 100 live pigs stashed in the hold. The livestock was being flown to Mexico in crates in the cargo bay of a Boeing 787 aircraft.
For the first few hours, passengers onboard hardly knew about the pigs in the hold, but six hours into the flight their presence became known all too well. That’s because the smell of the animals began drifting into the cabin and the cockpit, as Business Insider reports. The smell onboard reportedly got so bad that the crew was forced to call for a diversion to Bermuda:
A spokesperson for Skyport, the firm that runs Bermuda’s LF Wade International Airport, told Business Insider the diversion was caused by “the distinctive aroma of 100 pigs traveling in the cargo hold,” saying the stench “prompted the flight crew to divert to Bermuda for a fresh-air break.”
A KLM spokesperson said that halfway through the flight, “a strong smell caused by live animals (pigs) in the cargo hold reached the cockpit.” They added that the flight was diverted as a standard precaution.
Once landed on the island, all 259 passengers and crew onboard the plane were processed through immigration and sent to local hotels, where they stayed for 26 hours as a result of the diversion. In the meantime, the pigs were transferred to a holding area and the plane was cleaned, adds the New York Post.
A government inspected the animals and the porcine cargo was cleared to fly once again. After this, the pigs were loaded back into the belly of the 787, the passengers were boarded and the plane took to the skies once again.
The KLM flight left Bermuda at 6:26 p.m. and finally landed in Mexico City at 9 PM on Sunday evening, a full 26 hours later than it was initially scheduled to arrive, as the Post adds:
“Our team at Skyport is accustomed to managing all sorts of unusual situations, and today was no exception,” a Skyport spokesperson said in a statement. “Thanks to excellent collaboration between KLM, Delta Air Lines, and local partners, both our two-legged and four-legged visitors are safe and well cared for — even if this wasn’t quite the Christmas vacation they had planned.”
The incident onboard this weekend’s KLM flight is the latest in a long string of diversions that airlines around the world have faced in recent weeks. Last month, an American Airlines flight was forced back to its departure airport after a mysterious banging sound was reported onboard and a Turkish Airlines flight diverted to New York after the captain collapsed and died while onboard.