United Airlines planes taxi at Denver International Airport (DEN) in Denver, Colorado, on July 30, 2023.
Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images
United Airlines passengers en route to Rome last month were stuck on the plane for more than 7 hours.
Scott Rosnov, a passenger in business class, told Insider that it felt like being taken “hostage.”
Flight attendants did not serve food, provided very little water and did not communicate properly, he said.
A United Airlines passenger trapped on a plane for more than seven hours on the runway said it felt “like being tortured” after being left without food or air conditioning.
Scott Rosnov and his wife were on board Flight UA40 from Newark International Airport to Leonardo da Vinci Fiumicino Airport in Rome on July 3 when it failed to take off due to a technical issue.
The couple were on their way to their long-awaited honeymoon and had splurged on business class tickets, he said.
The flight was initially only delayed for 20 minutes after flight personnel identified a problem with the air conditioning, Rosnov told Insider.
But after multiple attempts to fix it and two attempts at taxiing, the flight was eventually delayed for more than seven hours before it was then canceled.
“We boarded the plane at 4.40 p.m and didn’t get off until about between 12:30 and 12:45 a.m.,” he said.
Other passengers said they were left in the sweltering heat, with no food or water, and little information about what was happening, according to multiple reports.
Rosnov told Insider that throughout the entire ordeal, the pilot only communicated with the passengers two times while flight attendants “just didn’t care.”
“The flight attendants and the pilots did a horrible job from top to bottom,” Rosnov told Insider. “I’m not calling them bad people, but they just didn’t care. It was as almost as if they knew this flight wasn’t going anywhere the whole time.”
“We just weren’t treated well, we were kind of treated a little inhumanely even from that perspective. Forget being locked on a plane hostage for eight hours, they just didn’t do anything to help,” he added.
People queuing at the United Airlines customer service counter in Newark Liberty International Airport after their flight was delayed for up to eight hours and cancelled on July 4, 2023.
Scott Rosnov
Rosnov said that when they first boarded the plane, he knew something was off because of how hot it was, adding: I was expecting it to be cold like every time you board any plane, but sweat was dripping from my forehead.”
Each business class passenger got one bottle of water, but when he asked if he could have another one, Rosnov said the flight attendant said she “had to look for some” because they were running low, which struck him as unusual.
“We’re just about to be on a nine-hour flight — how do you not have water?” he said. “Of all this, we had it way better being upfront in first class. I feel way worse for the people sitting behind us.”
A passenger in economy class told Newsweek that they were barely given any water and that one girl ended up passing out “due to heat exhaustion.”
After their second attempt at taxiing was aborted, the plane erupted into “pandemonium,” Rosnov said.
“At that point, people started standing up and saying ‘screw the rules,'” he said. “You could smell the food in the hot boxes. So this is almost like being tortured a little bit. We didn’t even get a pretzel, not a peanut, nothing.”
Rosnov also said there were about “three to four hours between when we were told the plane was returning to the gate and when we were able to get off the actual plane.”
Though the incident took place in early July, it didn’t come to public attention until after passengers posted about it on social media.
Rosnov, who had to spend thousands to book a hotel room and a new flight to Rome from John F. Kennedy Airport the following day, told Insider he is still waiting on his refund.
“I get cancellations can happen, but it didn’t have to come at the expense of holding hostage human lives,” he added.
A spokesperson for the company did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, sent outside normal working hours.
Both the airline and the US Department of Transportation said that they would investigate the incident.