The camera pans across the floor below two rows of passenger seats. The carpet is littered with so many crisp crumbs that it looks, from a glance, as if snow might have been falling. “Cabin crew told us they don’t clean between flights,” reads the caption on the resulting TikTok video, which was taken on a recent Ryanair flight from the Canary Islands to London.
In another recent video, a passenger’s hand thumps the seat, causing a dense cloud of dust-like particles — also resembling snow — to rise up on a Qantas flight within Australia. “OMG that is foul,” one commenter writes on Facebook.
Pandemic travel has been chaotic and frustrating. But for the most part it has been relatively clean, with many airlines committing to robust sanitation practices early in the pandemic, and numerous virus-wary travellers additionally wiping down their areas.
These two widely shared videos of particularly filthy planes have raised concerns that the days of clean flights may be going the way of mask wearing. They also sparked a debate about whether flight crew or passengers carry the responsibility for messes.
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“Flight attendants are not maids,” says Nicole Lawson, a flight attendant from New Jersey who does not work for either airline but has been frustrated by how many passengers fail to take advantage of numerous opportunities to throw their trash in a bag.
Beyond all the crisps littering the aisles, Scott spotted a spilled drink and what appeared to be vomit. The crew not only rudely told him it was not their job to help him clean it up, he says, but also declined his request for a wipe
What particularly irks Scott, the 23-year-old travel-focused content creator from England who posted the Ryanair video, is the flight crew’s attitude. (Scott declines to use his full name because of his day job as a police officer.)
“There was rubbish everywhere,” he says. Beyond all the crisps littering the aisles, he spotted a spilled drink and what appeared to be vomit. The crew not only rudely told him it was not their job to help him clean it up, he says, but also declined his request for a wipe.
What surprises him about the response he and his partner have had on their TikTok and Instagram accounts is how many of the more than 2,000 comments are defending the crew.
“They have 25 minutes on the ground they can barely complete safety checks,” one person writes in a well-liked comment. “Don’t blame them blame the people who left it.”
“If my flight is 20 quid I can handle a few crumbs,” writes another.
And although the Irish carrier does offer absurdly cheap flights, Scott says he and his partner paid about £200, or about €230, each, which is why he would expect more.
As for what the airline’s official policy on cleaning is, it’s somewhat unclear. In May 2020 Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s group chief executive, said the airline did not have time to clean between flights and would deep clean just once a day. In contrast, a Ryanair spokeswoman now writes, “Our aircraft are cleaned during every turnaround.” (She does not immediately respond to additional questions.)
The five-hour Qantas flight from Sydney to Perth is the most expensive flight Ross Matthews has ever taken. It is his video of his experience that has prompted some to wonder whether even big carriers have relinquished the cleaning standards established during the pandemic
Either way, the cloud of mystery particles on the Qantas flight is somewhat more surprising, given that Australia’s largest airline is not a low-cost carrier. The five-hour flight from Sydney to Perth is the most expensive flight Ross Matthews has ever taken, he writes in the post accompanying his video on Facebook. It is this video that has prompted some to wonder whether even big carriers have relinquished the cleaning standards established during the pandemic.
Indeed, many have. Early in the pandemic, most airlines committed to extensive sanitation measures. These promises gradually faded away for reasons based on cost, inconvenience and science. By the spring of 2020, research had revealed that coronavirus is unlikely to spread on surfaces, and masking and ventilation systems gradually became the focus if you were trying to avoid getting infected. In June 2020, for example, United Airlines said that it would disinfect cabins by spraying an electrostatically charged mist between each flight. By July the next year, the airline told the Points Guy, a travel-focused site, that it had switched its approach to applying a different type of disinfectant just once a week.
Early this year the US low-cost carrier JetBlue stopped bringing in professional cleaning crews to clean tray tables between flights, something it had started doing in the spring of 2020, says a flight attendant. Similarly, by August 2020, its rival Southwest said it had stopped disinfecting armrests and seat belts between flights.
Cleaning up crisps from the floor is different, of course, from coating surfaces with a chemical that is supposed to kill viruses. Airline policies on this issue vary. Some carriers, such as American Airlines, bring in a cleaning crew between every flight, the airline says. Others, such as JetBlue, only do this when flights are arriving from outside the United States. Otherwise, JetBlue, like Southwest, relies on flight crew to do light tidying between domestic flights while they are putting seat belts back in place, says several flight attendants. Delta claims that its cleaning teams “conduct frequent and thorough wipe downs of our aircraft interiors”.
Flight attendants are usually responsible for giving passengers opportunities to throw away their trash but not for vacuuming or wiping anything down. Still, some passengers treat planes like sports stadiums by throwing food on the floor, according to crew
By and large, though, flight attendants are responsible for giving passengers opportunities to throw away their trash but not for vacuuming or wiping anything down. Those sorts of tasks are supposed to fall on separate cleaning crews, who may not get on to the plane before its next flight. Still, some passengers treat planes like sports stadiums by throwing food on the floor, says flight attendants.
“The entitlement is unreal,” says Nastassja Lewis, a flight attendant and the founder of th|AIR|apy, a nonprofit focused on flight attendants’ mental health. “What is so hard about discarding your trash?” she asks.
As to how freaked out by the Qantas cloud passengers should be, it’s hard to say.
“Based on the video, it is unclear what has been spilt on the seat and when,” an airline representative says, adding that the seat has since been cleaned. The Australian carrier also says that it puts aircraft through “a deep cleaning on a regular basis”, which includes seat covers and cushions. — This article originally appeared in The New York Times