A woman named Heather Szilagyi posted pictures of bed bug bites on her 7-year-old, alleging her whole family got chomped on while flying British Airways from Canada to Slovakia earlier this month. Bed bugs: they have lift-off.
The Guardian reports that nowhere is safe, and you may at some point be trapped on a metal tube hurling through the air as blood-drinking buggos infest your luggage. Szilagyi says she saw the bugs themselves in mid-flight on both the seat in front of her and crawling around the TV monitor:
“I wanted to grab it but they’re quick and it crawled back inside, behind the screen,” she told the Canadian broadcaster CTV.
Szilagyi says she alerted a flight attendant but was told the flight was full and nothing could be done. “It was nine hours of knowing that I was probably going to get bit, but not being sure,” she said.
Szilagyi says she knows both she and her daughter are very sensitive, so the bites look especially bad. Her fiancé also supposedly got bit six times. And she apparently isn’t even asking for a refund—just a guarantee that her family won’t be trapped on the same nightmare metal eagle for the return trip, and that British Airways will fumigate the cursed plane that haunts them. A spokesperson gave the Guardian a statement:
“We have been in touch with our customer to apologise and investigate further. British Airways operates more than 280,000 flights every year and reports of bed bugs onboard are extremely rare. Nevertheless, we are vigilant and continually monitor our aircraft.”
Like flying through the sky wasn’t scary enough.