A JetBlue passenger was in for a nasty surprise during a recent flight when she looked up to see the shadow of a rat scurrying inside the light fixture running along the bottom of the overhead bin.
“You can’t make this s**t up! Our first class [flight] with JetBlue had a rat. YES, a RAT in the overhead bin!!” wrote Brittney Nicole in an Instagram post of the incident that has now gone viral.
While Brittney hasn’t disclosed any further details of where and when this incident occurred, the rat seems to have been spotted in one of JetBlue’s newest planes, judging by the distinctive overhead bin lighting.
Along with being a gross-out moment, a rat on a plane is most definitely a serious safety issue that could force JetBlue to ground the jet until it has sent the exterminators in.
While rare, it’s not unheard of for airlines to have to deal with rodents on airplanes – a nightmare scenario that can cost a lot of money to deal with.
Unlike other common pests, mice and rats are a particular issue for airlines because they have been known to chew through wiring. And given the sensitive nature of aircraft wiring systems, that’s definitely not something you want happening at 30,000 feet.
It doesn’t look like JetBlue diverted this plane to deal with its rodent stowaway, but some airlines take the issue so seriously that a diversion is immediately ordered. In February, for example, the pilots of an SAS Scandinavian Airlines flight from Stockholm to the Spanish holiday resort town of Malaga were forced to turn back nearly two hours into the flight after passengers spotted a rodent stowaway on board the Airbus A320.
The aircraft was flying at around 37,000 feet above Europe when the pilots reported to air traffic control that passengers had seen a mouse in the cabin and that they needed to return to Stockholm to have the stowaway removed.
The passengers ended up on a three-hour flight to nowhere, landing back in the Swedish capital, where the plane was taken out of service for the rest of the day while engineers worked to rid the aircraft of the rodent and any of its friends.
SAS has been particularly unlucky with rodents on planes, as this incident happened less than a year and a half after another of its flights to Malaga also had to divert when a mouse was spotted in the cabin.
Common pests found on airplanes include bed bugs, cockroaches, and, in some countries, even snakes. In January 2024, flight attendants on an AirAsia flight from Bangkok to Phuket deployed plastic carrier bags to catch a stowaway snake that was spotted keeping warm in the overhead lighting of the Airbus A320 aircraft.
