Nasty streak on Delta stains passenger’s flight

“Not another flight that smells bad,” Matthew Meehan recalled thinking as he boarded Delta flight 1949 in Atlanta on Thursday night — 115 years into the age of powered flight and God knows how long into the nightmare of modern air travel.

Meehan told Yahoo News that he noticed his seat mate was also in apparent olfactory distress. He bent down under his seat and discovered the foulness’ source.

“It’s not just a smell,” he said, reliving the memory. “It’s actually feces and it’s all over the back of my legs, it’s all over the floor, all over the wall of the plane. And I sat in it.”

In the initial confusion, Meehan said, he didn’t know from whom or what the feces came.

He asked the crew for help. Instead, he told WNEM, “I was handed two paper towels and one of those miniature bottles of Bombay Sapphire.”

Meehan slid past passengers still finding their seats and stowing their bags, and ducked into a bathroom.

His suit pants and ankles were smeared in filth, he said.

“I’m NOT HAPPY DELTA!” he wrote on Facebook. “Is this even legal? This is a HEALTH CODE VIOLATION!”

When Meehan left the bathroom, he said, the mess was still spread across his seating area. He said the flight crew told him to talk to a gate agent.

“I’m in a Delta flight and I just sat in human feces,” Meehan said into his cellphone camera as he paced the jet bridge a few minutes later, unsure of what to do. A passenger walked past him, luggage in tow, and boarded the plane he’d stepped off.

Meehan said he found a manager at the gate. “What’s your problem?” she asked him, he told WNEM.

He told the agent what his problem and, in his opinion, everyone on the plane’s problem was.

“I said, ‘Can we get that cleaned up so I can sit down?’ ” he recalled. “So she says, ‘Sir, it’s almost time for that plane to leave. You can sit in your seat or you can be left behind.’ ”

He went back to the plane. When he got there, he said, several passengers were staging a sort of stand-in protest at the front of the cabin, refusing to sit down until someone cleaned up the feces.

In a statement this week, Delta apologized to Meehan and acknowledged that “the area around his seat was not appropriately cleaned following an incident involving an ill emotional support animal.”