A consignment of onions is being partly blamed for an Air India Express flight being diverted.
The Sharjah bound flight returned to Kochi after ‘pungent’ and ‘burning’ smells were detected in the cabin.
The flight deck was alerted by passengers, rather than a malfunction alert from the cockpit.
Several passengers complained about the smell.
The airline confirmed onions and other vegetables were being transported in the hold and this may have been the source of the odour.
It apologized to customers and re-accommodated them on a later flight.
In 2018, passengers in Indonesia refused to fly due a cargo shipment of the notorious Durian fruit.
Passengers succeeded in getting the two-ton shipment of Durian removed.
The so-called ‘king of fruits’ is a relatively expensive delicacy across Southeast Asia but is banned on most public transport and in public buildings.
The Durian’s highly potent smell can be very off-putting.
The smell has even triggered gas leak alerts at a block of flats in the UK and Germany, and at an Australian university campus.
The late food presenter Anthony Bourdain famously described the Durian’s smell as: ‘your breath will smell as if you’d been French-kissing your dead grandmother.’
