A sick daze as jet lands at Kennedy
Dozens ill aboard flight, bathrooms ‘gross’
It was a nauseous nightmare at 40,000 fetid feet.
Sickly passengers spewed vomit in airplane bathrooms across 14 unsettling hours before the Wednesday morning arrival of infectious Emirates Flight 203 — with 11 ailing people hospitalized and the rest of the 549 passengers and crew members from Dubai temporarily quarantined on the Kennedy Airport tarmac.
“People were coughing and spreading germs,” said passenger Erin Sykes, 36, of Manhattan. “It was everywhere . . . . I would say say a good 50% in economy class were sick. The people behind me, I could literally feel (them) coughing.”
Scores of passengers fell ill in midair, with a number vomiting throughout the long trip.
“The bathrooms were totally unusable by the end,” said Sykes, who covered her head with a blanket to ward off germs. “The bathrooms were gross. Just gross.”
Among the lucky passengers who dodged the virus: Rapper Vanilla Ice, who was feeling nice, nice, baby after touching down in Queens.
“So I just landed in New York coming back from Dubai and now I’m stuck on the runway with like 1000 police, ambulances, fire trucks,” Ice said via Twitter, including a video clip of the emergency vehicles at the airport. “This is crazy.”
The rapper later said he dodged the unidentified bug because his business class seat was on the top floor of the double-decker plane. He estimated there were about 100 ill passengers down below.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was summoned to meet the plane after reports from the incoming flight of widespread coughing, fever and gastrointestinal illness, and agency workers helped local groups conduct health evaluations of all the passengers aboard. Those taken to Jamaica Hospital were afflicted with headaches, sore throats and fever, the facility said in a statement.
Passenger Hadi Nadimi, 33, of Waterbury, Conn., knew something was amiss when he saw the flight attendants rushing frantically around near the cockpit. “Finally they told us everybody’s sick,” said Nadimi.
“Why did you take that long to tell us? It was iffy from the get-go. They knew right away there were a lot of sick people on the plane.”
Nadimi, though feeling fine as he left the Queens airport, was nervous about whether he contracted something during the flight. “What’s going to happen in the next 72 hours?” he asked. “Am I going to catch something? I’m ready to go home and take a shower.”
A City Hall spokesman said some of the passengers came from the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, home to a recent flu outbreak.
The Airbus A380 was moved away from terminals and quarantined. A probe continues into what caused the coughing, high fever and nausea — and how they spread so rapidly.