Do you ever get that feeling when pre-holiday that you left something important? For one woman, that something was pretty critical. On Sunday, March 10, Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight SV832 heading to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was forced to turn back when a woman alerted cabin crew that she had forgotten something important: her baby.
A video of the conversation between traffic control and the pilot has gone viral. In a translation by The Guardian, the pilot is heard saying, “May God be with us. Can we come back?”
Videos by VICE
The operator is left confused and can be heard asking others for the protocol, saying: “a passenger forgot her baby in the waiting area, the poor thing.” The pilot is then asked again why he needs to turn back, and he repeats “I told you, a passenger has left her baby in the terminal and she is refusing to continue the flight.”
After some confusion and a pause, the pilot is given permission to turn back, with the air traffic controller exclaiming that “this is totally a new one for us.”
How the mother forgot her child is not confirmed. The Twitter user who shared the original footage, Fahad M. Al Barrak, claims that the mother left her baby at the terminal with her sister.
In the comments of the video, the pilot was applauded for his “humanity” for treating the case as an emergency. In response to hate the mother was receiving, user Abdul Razzaq wrote “instead of mocking the mother, give her benefit of [the] doubt. She might have got dementia or short term memory loss issues.” User Swad Jed had a simpler explanation: “possible she was busy in whats app or Instagram.”
To reassure the mother, someone could also tell her that in 2015, someone’s poo was so smelly that British Airways had to turn its flight back around.
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