A seven-hour flight without working toilets was the longest, thought the captain and a lot of needy passengers on board the plane that took off from Luleå on Thursday afternoon.
The solution was to go down for a quick stopover in Porto in northern Portugal to allow the passengers to relieve the pressure, by emptying the aircraft’s tanks and thus being able to open the closed toilets.
“It was obviously uncomfortable for those who couldn’t go to the toilet during the first part of the flight,” says the communications manager Birthe Madsen at the Danish airline Jettime, to Norr Media.
There are divided opinions about what went wrong. The airline says airport staff in Luleå may have forgotten to empty the urinals, or failed to close them properly, causing the toilets to malfunction.
Airport manager Ann-Christin Viklund, however, denies that her staff did anything wrong.
“We have done our job on the spot to take care of the travelers and what needs to be done with the aircraft in connection with a turnaround,” she tells the newspaper company.