Habib Battah was on Air France's Paris-Toronto flight on June 30 when he noticed an unpleasant-smelling wet mess under the seats. Thinking it was somehow the work of his cat, traveling with him and his wife, he got to work cleaning it up only to realize the carpet was soaked with blood. Human blood. Excrement, too, which explained the stench.
As Battah was cleaning, the flight attendant had passed the message on to her coworkers, and the captain was radioing Paris, asking what on earth was the blood red stain under seats 30A and 30B. The news came back from Air France HQ: it was human blood. The day before, on a Paris -Boston flight, a male passenger had suffered what Battah says the crew called a "hemorrhage." The passenger had survived, and the captain of that flight had requested that the area be cleaned for the aircraft's next flight back to Paris – but seemingly the cleaners had forgotten about the floor.
The flight crew were not particularly bothered, Battah says, and offered only two bottles of water as recompense. In a statement, Air France claims there were only "residual" traces of blood and human excrement–despite Battah's photos showing the cat carrier stained by it.
Any airline can end up delivering bad service, it's just the nature of the business. But if you want to be soaked in biohazardous human waste left by a blood- and diarrhea-spewing passenger days earlier and be told to clean it up yourself, for that you might need the French national carrier.
