Let me just state unequivocally for the record that I am not a doctor or a dietician. I am not in a position to diagnose the digestive problems of anyone at all, let alone someone I’ve never met. I will, however, gently make this suggestion: if your farts are bad enough that they inspire a brawl among the passengers around you on an aircraft, subsequently forcing said aircraft to make an unplanned landing at a closer airport, you may want to examine your diet.
I offer this advice to the man who set off this exact chain of events with his powerful farts last weekend on a Transavia Airlines flight from Dubai to Amsterdam. According to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, two passengers on the flight became so enraged with the man’s inability to stop doing just the worst farts that, despite warnings from both the flight crew and the pilot, a fight broke out between the pair of them and the fartist.
When the plane was diverted to Vienna, the two men and a pair of sisters who were sitting in the same row were removed by Austrian police, who subsequently released them without charge, as they had not broken any Austrian laws.
The sisters have indicated that they will be taking legal action against the airline, claiming that the experience was “humiliating” and that they are guilty of nothing except having the misfortune of being placed in the same row as the farter and the anti-farters.
Transavia Airlines have stood by their crew’s account of the events, asserting that all four were involved in the brawl, and banning all of them from the airline for life:
Our crew must ensure a safe flight. When passengers pose risks, they immediately intervene. Our people are trained for that. They know very well where the boundaries are. Transavia is therefore square behind the cabin crew and the pilots.
It is unclear what happened to the fart deployer but, hopefully, he is right now looking into whether he has a problem with lactose or gluten.
A vaguely similar incident occurred in 2015, in which a Singapore Airlines flight was forced into an emergency landing after the excessive methane coming out of its cargo of 2,200 live sheep set off the fire alarm. Incredible.
