A flight crew from SkyWest Airlines says it was forced to sleep on the plane after its flight was diverted by thunderstorms to a small Colorado town that had no available hotel accommodations.
The incident happened on July 17 during a trip from Denver to Raleigh, N.C., and back to Denver, according to Business Insider.
SkyWest Airlines was operating Flight 5332 on behalf of United Express, the regional brand for United Airlines, and was forced to make a series of turns and fly in a holding pattern on the way back to Denver because of severe storms.
The captain, Jessica Taylor, was finally told to land in the small town of Hayden, Colo., which had a landing strip long enough to accommodate the plane - but not much else.
Taylor wrote on social media: "After flying 8+ hours from Den-Rdu-Den (well Hayden after diverting) my crew and (I) had to sleep on the airplane overnight …. Yes that's right we slept on the floor of the airplane in Hayden."
SkyWest didn't confirm Taylor's account but told Insider that hotel accommodations had not been available in Hayden.
"Though we worked to make arrangements to get our customers to their destinations that evening, unfortunately the nearby area did not have hotel accommodations available under the circumstances," SkyWest said in a statement to Insider. "We, along with our partners at United, apologized and United has reached out to customers to provide compensation for the inconvenience."
The aircraft, an Embraer E170 regional jet registered as N613UX, departed for Denver the next afternoon and landed nearly 24 hours after it had left Raleigh, according to Flightradar24 data.
"This is a first for me in 15+ years of professionally flying," Taylor wrote. "I personally never thought I'd find myself sleeping on the floor of a plane as 38-year-old airline captain."
The Embraer E170 does have a first-class cabin with recliner seats, but the aircraft isn't meant for overnight sleeping. United says the first-class seats are 24 inches wide with 38 inches of pitch and 6 inches of recline.
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