Passenger Forgot Baby in Airport, Plane Turns Back
Jennifer Billock March 13, 2019
Being a parent, especially a new parent, can be disorienting. Your mind can get preoccupied with a laundry list of things to get done every day and sometimes you forget a thing or two. And if you’ve seen Home Alone, sometimes the unthinkable happens: You forget about your child. A passenger on a recent Saudia flight learned that the hard way when she forgot her baby in the airport.
Over the weekend, passengers and crew of Saudia flight SV832, flying from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur, encountered a pretty strange situation. The plane had to turn around because, for whatever reason, a passenger forgot her baby in the King Abdul Aziz International Airport.
Shortly after the plane took off, the passenger told cabin crew that they needed to turn the plane around so she could get her child. The pilots immediately requested permission from air traffic control.
“May God be with us,” the pilots are heard saying in a video shared by Gulf News. “Can we come back or what?” The air traffic control operator wasn’t quite sure what to do, saying, “This flight is requesting to come back…a passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing.”
They had the pilot reconfirm the issue, which he did: “We told you, a passenger left her baby in the terminal and refuses to continue the flight.” And then told him to come on back: “Ok, head back to the gate. This is totally a new one for us!”
Luckily the flight wasn’t delayed too much—only about 57 minutes. And the passenger was reunited with her baby, thanks to the kindness of the pilot.
[Source: Shutterstock]
Before anybody judges... yes, you can have a brain fart. Yes, even with your baby. Perhaps especially after not sleeping the night before or something. We are humans. Brain farts happen. Some otherwise fine people end up forgetting babies in cars... At least based of what hottirnip said the poor thing was not in any danger. Feel for the parents.
I would have thought the plane would be too heavy to land without dumping fuel.
The longer version of this story indicates that the woman left the baby with an older daughter, who somehow got on the wrong shuttle to the aircraft. So she didn't exactly "forget" the baby; perhaps the daughter was to be seated elsewhere, or the mother may have been thinking at any moment the daughter would show up, and then suddenly it was too late.