A British Airways flight from Vancouver to London apparently had some additional passengers. No, they weren’t humans. (Photo: PASCAL PAVANI/AFP/Getty Images)
BBC News – An overnight British Airways flight from Vancouver to London, Heather Szilagyi saw some bed bugs, complained to a flight attendant, but then wasn’t allowed to change seats with the flight being full. Thus, for the rest of the nine-hour flight, she and her eight-year daughter had to share seats with bed bugs.
And since bed bugs don’t have little tiny seat belts, during the night they were free to roam around biting Szilagyi and her daughter. Thus next morning, the result was not only red eyes but also multiple red bites.
…a bedbug is about the size of an apple seed, has a beak that can penetrate your skin and inject an anesthetic so that you don’t feel the bite and an anticoagulant so that your blood keeps flowing, and feed on your blood until it swells up several times its size.
According to CTV, after Szilagyi, her daughter, and her fiance landed, she tried to contact British Airways customer service to warn them about the bed bug problem and avoid the same plane on their return flight back but struggled to reach a live customer service agent. Reportedly, her recourse then was to post photos of their bites on Twitter and tag British Airlines. That seemed to get the airline’s attention as two days later a customer service agent contacted her. Eventually, she and her companions got an upgrade to business class on the return flight and an apology.
Bed bugs suck, literally and figuratively. Otherwise known as Cimex lectularius, a bedbug is about the size of an apple seed, has a beak that can penetrate your skin and inject an anesthetic so that you don’t feel the bite and an anticoagulant so that your blood keeps flowing, and feed on your blood until it swells up several times its size. If this description doesn’t give you the creepy crawlies, take a look at this National Geographic segment so that you can see it in action:
While the hotel industry has been battling bed bugs for years, as described by Bourree Lam for the Atlantic, it isn’t clear how many airplanes have had bed bugs and how many bed bug cases on airplanes (which I guess would be airplane seat bug cases) go unnoticed or unreported. As Patrick Greenfield wrote for The Guadian, a British Airways spokesperson stated: “We have been in touch with our customer to apologize and investigate further. British Airways operates more than 280,000 flights every year and reports of bed bugs onboard are extremely rare. Nevertheless, we are vigilant and continually monitor our aircraft.” But bed bugs can go unnoticed for a while and bed bug bites can be mistaken for other insect bites.
With so many people moving in and out of an airplane each day and flights being packed, one could see how bed bugs could make their way on board if the planes aren’t carefully inspected or cleaned. Now, apparently, bed bugs are somewhat introverted, at least according to a Global News piece by Rebecca Joseph that quoted Murray Isman, a University of British Columbia professor of entomology and toxicology, as saying:”bed bugs don’t like a lot of disturbance or movement. They like it quiet, dark.” This may make them less likely to like the airplane environment. (Hooray, for noisy airplanes.) But does it mean that a bed bug riding some clothes or luggage into a plane will say “not for me,” turn around, leave the plane, and find someone who is headed to a hotel instead? Not necessarily.
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The airline industry may want to look at what’s happened to many hotels and take preemptive steps to prevent bed bugs from becoming a bigger problem. After all, historical evidence suggests that bed bugs have crossed oceans and unless they have their own little rowboats or chartered jet, there’s a good chance that they or their eggs flew on commercial planes.
With reports from BBC News and Forbes
