United Flight U-Turns After Messy Toilet Mishap Stinks Up Cabin

It made for quite a long flight.

United Airlines' latest plane malfunction resulted in quite an unpleasant experience for passengers aboard an international flight on March 29. The flight took off from Frankfurt, Germany and was bound for San Francisco but was forced to turn around just a few hours into the trip after a bathroom mishap turned the entire plane into a porta-potty. 

According to German news outlet Bild, passengers reported a broken toilet in the bathroom sent the contents of the waste tank spilling into the cabin. The flight crew tried to figure out if the problem could be fixed while they were en route to the States as the plane circled over the North Sea. Finally, the plane returned right back to where it started in Frankfurt. 

A United Airlines spokesperson confirmed the incident in a statement to The US Sun. "On Friday, March 29, United Flight 59 returned to Frankfurt following a maintenance issue with one of the aircraft’s lavatories," the representative said. The airline remedied the situation by giving passengers hotel rooms for the night and rebooking them on other flights the following day. 

It's the latest flight traveling from Europe to California to experience problems with its lavatories. In February, a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Los Angeles was forced to turn around and land back in Amsterdam after flight crew discovered that eight of the airplane's nine bathrooms weren't working. Last September, a Delta flight had to turn around after a passenger's diarrhea in the cabin became a biohazard; the following month, another passenger on an EasyJet flight defecated on their plane. 

Bathrooms aren't as crucial to an airplane's operation as, say, the engines or wings, but they can certainly make or break the experience for passengers.