Sh!ts on a Plane: What would you do if the passenger next to you soils their pants?.

It didn’t take long, maybe 10 seconds at the most, for the front section of Southwest Flight 143 to fill with the unmistakable smell of human feces. As the air circulated in the narrow cabin, the stench grew with ferocity, and the culprit, a self-proclaimed World War II pilot, who we’ll call “Hank,” revealed himself as he made his way to the front bathroom.

With Hank locked in the bathroom and at least an hour left in the flight, my grandparents, Joe and Dorothy, said they and the other pre-boarders, mainly elderly passengers who filled the front few rows of the plane, hunkered down with the putrid odor. And that is when things got interesting.

As the air circulated in the narrow cabin, the stench grew with ferocity, and the culprit, a self-proclaimed World War II pilot, who we’ll call “Hank,” revealed himself as he made his way to the front bathroom.

One woman wrapped herself in a blanket becoming a human cocoon. Another passenger, a man in his 70s who sat catercorner to “The Pooper,” as my grandmother referred to him, began cashing in his free drink coupons for double shots of whiskey and Coke, while his wife, who was sitting in the aisle seat next to Hank, rode out the flight quietly; the other passenger in their row, a girl in her early 20s, immediately left for fresher pastures.

Hank returned to his seat 20 minutes later and that is when flight attendants went to work. Like a Navy SEAL breaching a hostile enclave, the stewardess cracked the bathroom door and unleashed a large amount of air freshener into the glorified porta-a-potty and the surrounding area. This, however, only made things worse for the senior passengers. Inundated by the floral fumes, the cocooned woman suffered an asthma attack and my grandparents said they also had difficulty breathing. After about 10 minutes, two flight attendants returned and cleaned the bathroom.

Once talkative, post-bathroom Hank remained quiet for the rest of the flight, asking only one question, “Where did the girl next to me go?”

We thought a while about what we would do if we were also stuck in this horrible situation and there’s no easy solution. I know I would feel bad for Hank and try to be subtle about it but really how would you deal with it?

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