Emirates plane quarantined as 100 passengers report feeling ill

A plane from Dubai is quarantined at JFK airport in New York after up to 100 people on board reported falling ill.

The Emirates plane was quarantined in New York after passengers fell ill. Picture: AP.

A large commercial jet from Dubai caused a scare on Wednesday after a pilot radioed that it would be landing at New York’s Kennedy Airport carrying several passengers and crew members who fell ill with flu-like symptoms.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immediately quarantined the double-decker Emirates aircraft holding 520 passengers so it could evaluate about 100 of them. Some had complained about coughs, headaches, sore throats and fevers.

Officials said 10 people - three passengers and seven crew members - ended up hospitalized in what Emirates called a “precaution.” The rest were cleared to continue their travels while the CDC sought to determine what caused the sickness.

So I just landed from Dubai and now there is like tons of ambulances and fire trucks and police all over the place pic.twitter.com/i9QLh6WyJW

— Vanilla Ice (@vanillaice) September 5, 2018

On social media, passengers including 1990s rapper Vanilla Ice, posted photos and videos of a large-scale emergency response when the aircraft touched down around 9 a.m. at JFK. Video from news helicopters showed the jet stranded on the tarmac for several minutes before passengers began to emerge so they could board buses to get to the terminal.

Vanilla Ice, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, posted a video on Facebook of an emergency response to an initial report that dozens of people could be sick. On Twitter, he described looking out the window to see several ambulances, fire trucks and police vehicles converge on the plane.

He also wrote that the sick people were seated on the “bottom floor” of the jumbo jet, “so I’m happy I’m up top.” Another traveler in the business class section of the aircraft, Raghida Dergham, also said in an interview that sick passengers were in a “lower level” economy section of the plane.

“I feel great. I feel fine,” Dergham said. “Nobody was alarmed. ... It was handled very well.” But other passengers said they suspected that some passengers were sick before they got on the plane and blamed the airline for not doing more to protect the health of others.

“Why did they allow them on the flight? ... I sat with them for 13 hours. If it’s a virus, we’re all getting sick,” said Srinivasa Rao.

Passenger Erin Sykes posted a video of officers in masks and gloves taking the temperature of passengers on the tarmac.

Getting off plane & getting temperatures checked. The girl in front of me is pregnant, poor thing! #emirates #emirates203 pic.twitter.com/qRZaCBijZ1

— Erin Sykes (@SykesStyle) September 5, 2018

In an interview, Sykes said she saw a few passengers being taken off the plane first for medical attention, but she added that “many, many” others were showing signs of illness.

“Very intense coughing. Violently sick. Going into the bathroom a lot,” she said when asked to describe the scene.

She added: “These people should know not to travel in a confined space with other healthy people.” Said another flier, Zeph Shamba, said he saw at least one man on the 14-hour flight coughing and vomiting.

“People were worried because we don’t know what it is. And we get down there and guys with masks on their noses and stuff like that,” Shamba said. “It’s like the plane from hell.”

Another passenger on the flight, Larry Coben, said he and other passengers knew more about what was happening through the media.

“We saw nothing and knew less,” he said in an interview. “Just added two hours to my 17 of flying.” Dubai-based Emirates operates five daily flights to New York, serving JFK and Newark, NJ, airports, and the airline has grown quickly across the globe. It takes advantage of its hub in Dubai to shuttle passengers between Asia, Europe and the West, courting high-end flyers with amenities in first and business class.

Emirates was drawn into a number of travel-related moves by President Trump’s White House in the administration’s early days.

Bookings to the US slumped in 2017 after the White House imposed a short-lived ban on travel from certain Muslim-majority countries that Emirates served. It also scrambled to comply with a temporary ban on gadgets the Trump administration imposed on some inbound flights.

Dow Jones with additional reporting from AP