Restaurant owners and New York City residents know just how difficult it can be to get rid of cockroaches once they penetrate a building — they spread quickly, skamper into crevices even faster and have tough exoskeletons that are not easy to crush.
While cockroaches can usually be found in the proximity of food, all types of industries regularly come across a problem that can revolt customers and cause a massive PR crisis.
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As most airlines, American Airlines (AAL) -) has had to deal with cockroaches over the years — in 2017, a passenger who found roaches crawling on his flight from Madrid to Miami harnessed the power of social media to demand a refund while one of its Boeing 777-300ER (BA) -) planes was dubbed "the roach coach" after being taken out of service to be treated for the insects over two months.
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This Airline Has An Original Solution To The Cockroach Problem
According to an internal memo dug up by flying industry blog View From The Wing, American Airlines has updated its procedure for dealing with cockroaches on widebody jets like B777 and B787.
Crew who spot a cockroach aboard a flight can either "perform an initial treatment of the aircraft" or "contact Management Of Change (the industry's term for the team in charge of health and cleanliness) to issue the applicable TAC deferral at the next available opportunity."
Regardless of what crew choose to do, they also need to create a note that instructs the MOC of the need for "follow-up treatment."
"This revised MON requirement will ensure follow-up treatments are accomplished per the schedule recommended by our vendor," the internal memo reads. "The previous procedure referred to the presence of pests, but this procedure is only applicable to cockroach sightings."
Separate instructions have, presumably, been released for other insects while these instructions came into effect on August 1.
The airline did not immediately return a request for comment.
Bugs On Airplanes Are More Common Than You Think
While instructions to "defer" in particular can make some particularly squeamish customers think twice about going on an American Airlines flight, almost every major airline has dealt with some sort of bug-related PR crisis.
After a passenger on an India-based Vistara flight took a photo of a cockroach in his in-flight meal, the airline took a sample of it to send to a laboratory and reported back that "no foreign object/insect was found in the particular meal sample."
In 2017, a woman flying on a British Airways flight from Vancouver to London claimed to have been left bleeding from the hundreds of bed bugs biting her in her seat.
During another flight by Canada-based vacation airline Air Transat, hundreds of cockroaches fell out of an overhead compartment and sowed chaos among the travelers.
"While disinfection became a huge talking point during the pandemic, insecticide has been in use for decades now," Mark Finlay and Pranjal Pande wrote for Simple Flying. "With aircraft carrying passengers from every corner of the world, insects are likely to jump onboard too, and just like strict regulations for travelers and cargo is enforced, bugs are no exception."
