Seattle Woman Says Flight Attendant Forced Her To Pick Dirty Diaper From Trash, Mouthed Profanities On Call

A Seattle woman has alleged that she was humiliated and threatened by a flight attendant for trying to dispose of her daughter's dirty diaper in a bathroom garbage bin.

Farah Naz Khan, a 34-year-old endocrinologist, told NBC News that she was on a Mesa Airlines flight from Montana to Houston Friday when the incident happened. Her husband and daughter, who is younger than 2, were with her.

Midway through the flight, Khan and her daughter went to the diaper changing station at the back of the plane, as there was none in the front. She then disposed of the dirty diaper in a scented disposal bag into a lavatory trash can. Khan said she did it the right way, having done it many times.

On her way back, she was confronted by a male flight attendant. "When I walked back to the front holding my diaper wipes container and, like, the pad that we used to change my daughter's diaper on, the flight attendant accosted me and said: 'Did you just dispose of a diaper back there? That's a biohazard'," Khan told NBC News.

Though she tried to explain, Khan said the attendant continued to yell at her. She alleged that the attendant then asked her to retrieve the used diaper from the trash can, which she calls a humiliating and degrading experience.

"It’s very frustrating, the whole situation is humiliating, degrading, discriminatory," Farah Naz Khan told KIRO-7.

She said he didn't apologize. "I still inconvenienced him even though I dug through the bathroom trash in the middle of a pandemic," she added. "Pretty sure that was much more hazardous to my health than the diaper in the trash would have been to anybody else on the plane."

Khan then asked another flight attendant on board for a garbage bag. However, the second attendant told her she had already disposed of the diaper properly. The second flight attendant called over the first flight attendant, and when Khan tried to speak to him, he refused to engage.

She had to keep the soiled diaper at her feet till the flight landed and could dispose of it only in the terminal. Khan then filed a customer service incident report upon landing.

However, a few hours later, she received calls from an unidentified 1-800 phone number. “When I picked up, it was the same flight attendant saying I had been placed on the ‘do not fly list’ because of a biohazard incident," said Khan.

"I said, ‘If that’s true, I’m going to need to seek legal recourse because I already filed a customer service complaint about this incident," she said. "When I said that, the tone completely changed of the person on the other end of the line from faking this threat about the no-fly list to just humiliating, degrading, and verbally harassing me and my family," Khan alleged.

"He said, ‘You people bring your children everywhere, you people should just drive everywhere, don’t you all know that nobody wants to listen to your effing children?"

After Khan started a social media campaign on the incident, she was contacted by the airline with a promise to "escalate this within the proper channels."

Meanwhile, a Mesa spokesperson told NBC News in a statement that "the details described by our customer do not meet the high standards that Mesa sets for our flight attendants and we are reviewing the matter."