Choose your fish: eels on a plane or worms?
A passenger handled the smaller version Tuesday while flying from Amsterdam to Detroit.
At one point she was settling into a nine-hour flight on Delta Airlines. The next caterpillar with a soft body and no legs fell on it.
“She was getting scared,” passenger Phillip Schott told Fox 2 Detroit. “She was just trying to… fight off those worms.”
Schott, who was sitting across the aisle, counted dozens of disgusting creatures. They came from a rotten fish wrapped in newspaper in the overhead compartment.
The plane, which was an hour's flight away, immediately returned to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.
Delta issued a statement saying the carry-on bag was incorrectly packed and the passengers were put on the next available flight from Amsterdam. She added that the plane was taken out of service for cleaning.
“We apologize to the customers of Flight 133 AMS-DTW,” the statement read.
Schott told WXYZ he first realized something was wrong when the other passenger kept making a repetitive motion on the empty seat next to her. As he continued to watch, he saw worms.
Finally, they caught the attention of flight attendants, who began searching for the source of the infection. When they opened the top box, another number of worms fell out.
Opening the overhead luggage compartment also released a foul odor that congested the noses of many passengers, Choti said. Flight attendants took the offending fish to the back of the plane.
“She was absolutely terrified,” Schott told WXYZ about the other passenger. “Especially when I saw the caterpillar fall on her, I was particularly terrified.”
He added that one of the passengers told those present that he was responsible for the fish, but Choti did not know whether any action had been taken against him.
Shuti said he was surprised that such a shipment had not been noticed by airport security.
He got another flight several hours later.
After discovering the worms, Schotti moved to another seat five rows back, but before the plane returned to Amsterdam, one of the creatures slid all the way into his new seat.
“I can only imagine what it would have been like if we had been on that plane for another seven hours,” he told WXYZ.
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