An American Airlines plane was grounded in an emergency landing after passengers reportedly spotted lice crawling around on a woman’s head. According to TikTok user Ethan Judelson, the airline shared little to no information about what prompted the emergency landing, and he instead found out about everything through word of mouth.
Ethan shares that upon realizing the plane had turned around, he asked the guy next to him what was going on. The passenger said that the flight crew had announced they needed to ground due to a “medical emergency.”
“I look around, no one’s, like, on the ground, no one’s freaking out. I’m like, it can’t be that dire,” he stated. “But we land, and as soon as we land this woman across the aisle from me, like, shoots up and, like, rushes to the front of the plane.”
A confused Ethan and another passenger sitting next to him, figured the woman was just eager to get off the plane. Shrugging it off, they were assured by the flight crew that everyone would be given more information once they were off the plane.
However, Ethan says once deplaned, all they were told was that their flight to New York would take off again in 12 hours. The passengers also got an email with a hotel voucher and $12 of spending money. The 28-year-old man did realize that there were two women who seemed to have knowledge of the situation, but they gave “cryptic” answers.
“They were like, ‘Let’s just say it was in the best interest of everyone here that they did this. It’s for the safety of the plane,'” he recalled them saying.
The following day, Ethan ended up finding out what really occurred through word of mouth. He heard two passengers say that the plane was grounded due to a lice outbreak. “Apparently those two girls, they saw bugs crawling out of the woman’s hair,” he said of the cryptic women from the day before.
They evidently alerted a flight attendant of the situation, leading to the emergency landing. He says that upon reboarding the plane, the two women were assigned to their same original seats and refused to sit in them. According to Ethan, the flight crew sat someone else in those seats. “I do not think the people who sat in those seats knew what was going on,” he said.