~ Mahvish Qureshi ’10
Have you ever found yourself waiting around at airports, flights delayed because of bad weather, or because of delayed arrival of the plane. Maybe you are waiting around because you missed a connecting flight. Well that would be a best case scenario for the passengers of a Biman Bangladesh airline flight from Dhaka to London a few weeks ago. The flight was delayed for ten hours, despite the clear weather, and the functioning air plane. The flight was delayed because of a toilet problem.
Passengers aboard the aircraft seemed to have neglected the importance of the sign above the toilets that are present in most airplane bathrooms which states that paper cups etc. are not to be flushed down the toilet but are to be disposed of in the trashcan. This misuse of the toilet caused the toilets to be blocked.
While the toilet problem was quickly fixed in only two hours, it seems the plane still could not take off due to transportation bans at night at Heathrow airport, so the passengers were made to wait and extra eight hours. The manager of Biman airline insists that there was nothing wrong with the aircraft and that this was not an engineering problem but simply a problem created by passengers.
It seems as if times may be bad for Biman Airlines in general. A few days before this delay, it had come to light that the airlines was having a few problems with its finances and being unable to pay its employees, there was also a recent article questioning the safety of travel with Biman airlines. Either way the Airlines manager denys these claims and states that there will be three new aircrafts added to the airlines collections and this should boost ticket sales and much more.