Cargo of 100 smelly hogs forces Dutch flight to Mexico to reroute to Bermuda

The crew of a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Mexico City diverted their flight to Bermuda last week after the stench of roughly 100 pigs in the cargo hold became unbearable.

KLM flight 685 left Amsterdam Friday for a roughly 12-hour flight to Mexico City. Instead, after about seven hours into the flight, the plane landed in Bermuda, according to FlightAware.

“The distinctive aroma of 100 pigs traveling in the cargo hold prompted the flight crew to divert to Bermuda for a fresh-air break. The 259 passengers and crew, who surely never expected their journey to go hog wild, were processed through immigration,” a spokesperson for LF Wade International Airport said in a statement, according to Bermuda news site Bernews.com.

The smell reached as far as the cockpit, a KLM spokesperson told USA Today.

The human passengers were given accommodation in local hotels and flew out of Bermuda to Mexico City on Saturday night, according to Bernews. The hogs were left in the hands of Bermuda veterinary officials.

“We didn’t really know what we were in for. On our way to the airport, a report came in saying ‘the captain has reported a lot of pigs and I am not joking’. I was a little floored when they showed me a manifest of [9,600 pounds] of live animals. Eventually, three crates were brought out and we could see fully what we were dealing with — we had about 100 pigs that were around four months of age,” Bermuda’s chief veterinary officer Jonathan Nisbett told The Royal Gazette newspaper.

While officials were not that concerned about the prospect of the pigs spreading disease, they did not know when the pigs had last had food and water, having traveled to the Netherlands via Denmark. 

Conversely, breaking open their crates would have allowed Mexican authorities to reject the shipment because they would not have proper documentation, Mr. Nisbett said.

Ultimately, a team dropped chicken feed over the crates to feed the pedigree breeding pigs, and KLM chartered a second flight to Bermuda to pick up the pigs for their final leg of the trek to Mexico.

The second KLM flight to Bermuda arrived Sunday, according to FlightAware.