On Thursday November 3rd a plane of British company Jet2 had to make an emergency landing in Bilbao, Spain, so that passengers could go to the bathroom. The plane was on route between Gran Canaria and Manchester. As stated by the Twitter account Spotting Bilbao, a few minutes after flight LS 782 took off from Gran Canaria, it suffered a malfunction in the toilet that left all passengers without the possibility to use the restroom.
Apparently a failure in the sewage system made it impossible to use the toilet, which meant that the passengers could not relieve themselves for an undetermined amount of time and on a plane thousands of feet above the ground. The situation became so serious that the pilot made an urgent decision to request an emergency landing so that the passengers could go to the toilet.
The passengers had to endure a total of two hours without being able to go to the bathroom. When the situation became unbearable, they were only halfway through the trip, so they had another two hours to wait until they reached Manchester.
Upon seeing the situation, the pilot of Jet2 flight LS 782 requested permission to land at Bilbao Airport, so that they could unload the waste water, stored in the aircraft’s tanks, in order to restart the Airbus 321’s toilets.
The fact aroused the curiosity and surprise of aviation enthusiasts, as they saw on their tracking sites how a flight that was destined for Manchester landed in Bilbao without appearing to have had any safety failures. Once it became known what the reason for the emergency descent was, comments did not stop appearing on social media.
“It seems appropriate, the code of Bilbao airport is BIO, so it is the natural place for a bio break,” commented a user on Twitter. Others suggested that most of the passengers must have been English people who had gone on holiday to Gran Canaria and must have felt the urge to use the toilet after having a number of beers.
The plane made the special landing at 21:17 and an hour later took off again without the need for the 200 or so passengers to disembark. It resumed the second half of the journey and arrived in Manchester without any inconvenience.
