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10th Jun 2019

Flight delayed after a woman thought the emergency exit was a toilet

Rebecca O'Keeffe

flight delayed

HOW?

Do you ever read something, and immediately ask yourself “how the fuck?”

Yeah, this is one of those stories.

On Saturday, a flight from Manchester was delayed for over seven hours when a confused passenger opened an emergency exit after mistaking it for a toilet.

Yep.

The Pakistan International Airways (PIA) flight was ready to depart for Islamabad when the woman grabbed the wrong door.

The emergency evacuation slide was activated.

Weirdly, the flight was only able to take off when 38 passengers volunteered to leave the aircraft.

Chaos.

flight delayed

This was because the evacuation capacity had been reduced.

Some passengers even ended up having their luggage left in Manchester, which is more than a little annoying.

One passenger, tweeted:

“Pathetic service from PIA. I am one of the 38 passengers who voluntarily off loaded from PK702 so it can fly to Islamabad only on the condition that all 38 of us will get our luggage… Then when we reached here today we were told half of our luggage is still at Manchester airport. We have suffered a lot.”

You’d be fuming, in fairness.

A spokesperson for the airline said in a statement:

“All passengers were provided dinner. The offloaded passengers were provided with transportation and hotel accommodation and will be adjusted on the next available flight. PIA regrets the inconvenience caused to its passengers due to this incident.”