Passengers on board an Air Canada flight were alarmed to hear screaming and banging coming from within the aircraft chassis just before take off, it has been reported. The incident involved a person trapped inside the luggage hold.
The Air Canada Rouge flight AC1502 from Toronto Pearson International to Moncton was running around four and a half hours late on 13 December 2025, and was taxiing to the runway at 18:30, when, according to passenger reports on Reddit, knocking and shouting noises were heard from beyond the cabin.
The crew then informed the captain, who halted the Airbus A319. A reel posted by a passenger to Instagram reveals that the captain later made an announcement to passengers informing them that a baggage handler had become trapped inside the hold. An Air Canada press statement said that the hold doors had been “inadvertently closed while a member of the ground crew was inside.”
The aircraft returned to its gate, where, luckily, ground personnel were able to release the individual concerned, who was, the captain told passengers, “perfectly fine and safe.” Had the aircraft taken off with the handler still trapped inside the cargo hold, the outcome could have been very different. Cargo holds are not intended to accommodate humans in-flight. Even those that are pressurized and heated can lack oxygen and provoke a loss of consciousness, or drop to temperatures low enough to cause symptoms associated with severe cold, such as frostbite or hypothermia.
Air Canada has confirmed to the media that: “There were no injuries, but as this presented a potential safety issue, we have reinforced our procedures with our ground crews.”
For those in the cabin, an even longer delay ensued as crew members had reached their maximum working hours by the time the rescue and checks had taken place. The passengers were deboarded at 20:22, and despite an attempt to depart at 22:00, a technical issue then occurred. The flight did not leave until the following morning, almost a day after its scheduled slot.
In his announcement to passengers, the captain can be heard saying it was his first experience of such an event. But aviation experts note that even in tightly controlled airport environments, incidents like this are not completely unheard of, due to the complexity of commercial flight operations where multifaceted logistics, limited timeframes, and human errors can all play a part. In this instance, it seems the attentiveness of passengers to their surroundings helped to avert a disaster.
