Southwest flight delayed as attendant loses it over ‘some kind of Asian fried rice’
By Iris Jung
April 28, 2023
A Southwest Airlines flight from Atlanta to Houston was purportedly delayed for an hour due to spilled rice.
On April 15, flight attendants discovered rice on an aisle floor of their airplane.
Hoping to identify the person responsible for the spilled rice, one of the flight attendants purportedly confronted the plane’s passengers about the mess.
“The flight attendant screamed ‘who spilled rice?’ and is walking up and down the aisles,” Jennifer Schaper, a passenger on the plane, tweeted. “They are refusing to leave the gate until someone cleans the rice.”
Update: they are still refusing to leave until the rice has been cleaned. They are sending out for a broom. #RiceGate pic.twitter.com/2H8fIQwdsh
— Jennifer Schaper (@jenschap) April 15, 2023
After no one came forward, the flight attendants eventually gave up. However, one of them allegedly expressed her disappointment with the passengers over the plane’s loudspeaker.
“Rice is getting cleaned but [the flight attendant] is MAD,” Schaper updated on Twitter. “She has let us all know that we were not raised right and she is disappointed in all of us.”
Schaper reflected on the situation during a recent interview with KHOU 11, saying, “It was the end of a long day. They apparently had a complete crew change. I’m sure they were tired. We were all tired.”
She also noted that she did not witness anyone spill the rice near her seat: “I didn’t see it happen, but apparently one of the last passengers to board spilled a large amount of what looked like some sort of Asian fried rice… and the flight attendant was really, really mad about it.”
Schaper took to Twitter on April 20 to reflect on the incident, sharing both a serious and comical perspective of the situation and using the hashtag #RiceGate.
“For the record — I did not spill the rice, and the person who did absolutely should have cleaned it up,” she tweeted. “However, SWA [Southwest Airlines] staff was out of line in how they handled the situation and continued to delay an already delayed flight.
“The over-dramatization of the whole event made it more comical than anything,” Schaper added. She also shared that an “oblivious passenger” further delayed the flight after deciding to use the bathroom before takeoff.
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