Nearly seven hours were wasted in the air.
Flying overseas can mean several trips to a cramped airplane bathroom and waiting in line to use it. Lavatories might not be essential to the mechanical function of planes, but they certainly are for the customers and crew aboard them.
Passengers on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Los Angeles on Feb. 12 learned the importance of having working bathrooms firsthand. There were nine bathrooms on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, but eight of them stopped working, leaving the pilots with a decision to make.
According to AirLive, the flight attendants realized soon after takeoff that only one bathroom on the plane was working. It appears that the pilots first considered turning around about an hour into the flight, as flight data from FlightRadar24 shows the plane did a circle just north of the U.K. before eventually continuing on across Iceland and Greenland.
Deciding to push through wasn't going to work, however, especially for the more than 200 travelers on board. So after more than three hours of flying, the plane did a U-turn back to Amsterdam, wasting nearly seven hours total in the air.
Related: Man Shares Disgusting TikTok of Himself Cooking Shrimp in Airplane Bathroom
According to Simple Flying, KLM put the passengers on a different 787, which left the Netherlands nine hours after the original flight's scheduled departure. Meanwhile, the plane with the broken bathrooms was seemingly fixed overnight, as FlightRadar24 reports the plane has traveled to Houston and back and is scheduled to go to Mumbai and Kilimanjaro in the coming days.
Let this serve as a reminder to always use the bathroom in the airport immediately before boarding your flight. You never know what could happen.
