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Stinkers can be removed from the plane

I'm sure you know it. You're sitting comfortably with your loved one or a friend on the plane and there's an empty seat next to you. And who comes to sit down? Exactly, the person who seems to have not been near running water for four days and can't even spell the word deodorant. That one.

I once bought an upgrade (with my Flying Blue points) because the whole plane seemed to smell from New York. That's what you get when you take a late flight on a warm day. Last week we left with our team from Greece and at the airport in Thessaloniki there was a man who spread such a smell that you had to gag four meters away. It was so terrible that otherwise you could have called it impressive.

And yes, there we saw him in his red sweater and blue body warmer (for heaven's sake, who wears a BODY WARMER at a temperature of 25 degrees? Is it any wonder you start to stink?) waddling towards our plane.

Four rows behind me, two rows behind Lilian and Kiki. I've rarely seen them look so miserable. When the ninety-year-old grandmother next to me also folded her hands over her nose in horror, I had enough. Off to the stewardess.

That I also didn't know what she could do about it and that I didn't envy her at that moment, but that this was on the verge of unbearable. She had never had this happen before either. But hey, there was an empty row, so she approached the man, dryly said she had another spot for him, and off he went. Later she came to me to report back. And the best news ever that she had just heard from her purser. If I had rung the bell earlier, she could have had him removed from the plane.

It is indeed (and apparently) in the terms of most airlines: the transport of people with extreme body odor is explicitly excluded. It has really happened before, with a man who was removed from the plane in Hawaii. How embarrassing it is to be removed from the aircraft, he made it even more awkward by filing a lawsuit against the airline because he felt he didn't smell any worse than the other passengers.

So are you going to sit next to a stinker? Intervene. Educate that behavior. If I had known this earlier, I could have had much more pleasant flights.

The only one I still feel sorry for now is the stewardess. Because delivering that news seems almost as bad as sitting in the stench for twelve hours.