United flight to San Francisco diverted after odor fills cabin
A United Airlines flight was forced to turn around when the contents of a broken toilet poured into the aircraft's cabin.
United Flight 59 took off from Frankfurt, Germany, on Friday afternoon and was headed for San Francisco, California, before it had to reverse course a couple of hours into the flight, according to German news outlet Bild.
The contents of at least one of the toilets overflowed from the tank.
The Boeing 777 circled over the North Sea as the flight crew attempted to figure out if the problem could be resolved before it was eventually flown back to Frankfurt.
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"On Friday, March 29, United Flight 59 returned to Frankfurt following a maintenance issue with one of the aircraft’s lavatories," a spokesperson for United Airlines told the U.S. Sun.
Passengers aboard the flight were offered hotel rooms for the night and rebooked on other flights the following day, the spokesperson said.
United Airlines has had several chaotic incidents on their flights in recent weeks.
On Friday, several passengers on a flight from Israel to Newark were hospitalized after the aircraft, a Boeing 777-20, was forced to divert to New York’s Stewart International Airport due to high winds.
Earlier in March, a flight heading to San Francisco was forced to return to Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport in Australia over what the airline called a "maintenance issue." Video captured by an aviation enthusiast appeared to show fluid leaking from the wheel area of the Boeing 777-300 during takeoff. The plane was greeted on the tarmac by fire crews when it arrived back in Sydney.
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The week before, a United Airlines Boeing 777-200 lost a wheel while taking off from San Francisco on a flight bound for Japan, and had to be diverted to Los Angeles.
"Safety is our highest priority and is at the center of everything we do," United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in a letter to customers earlier this month. "Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, our airline has experienced a number of incidents that are reminders of the importance of safety."
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Boeing has also faced problems with its planes in recent months, starting with an incident in January when a fuselage panel on a 737 MAX 9 Alaska Airlines flight blew off mid-flight, forcing the aircraft to make an emergency landing in Portland shortly after takeoff.
The CEO of Boeing, Dave Calhoun, announced last week that he would step down at the end of the year.