Basic Economy Passenger Opens Up Athlete’s Foot Lounge—Right On His Neighbor’s Armrest

A barefoot passenger has their foot planted on the cabin wall just below the window, draped over the armrest in front of them. They couldn’t get an extended legroom seat, so they just extended their leg. Because basic economy here is also the Athlete’s Foot Lounge.

Bare feet on a plane are bad enough. Nobody needs to see this. Sticking those feet in someone else’s space is worse. It’s a whole new way to be awful at 30,000 feet. It was shared to social media on Monday, though appears to have originated with a domestic flight in Vietnam some time back.

The flight isn’t identified. Obviously calling a flight attendant for help is the ‘official’ advice in this situation, but what sort of guerilla tacts would you employ if faced with something like this?

• Take a sharpie to the safety card, stick it on the wall “No Foot Zone”
  
• Tape a cocktail napkin over the offending foot with “biohazard” scrawled in pen.
  
• Spill your coffee
  
• What’s your best shot?

Wwe should all recognize that plane surfaces are dirty. The one thing I really had hoped would last coming out of the pandemic was elevated cleanliness, but it really didn’t. These passengers are rubbing themselves all over the aircraft where someone else is going to be on the next flight without any kind of santizing afterward. And they’re sticking their extremities into spaces that belong to others, if only for the duration of the flight.

We’ve seen passengers clip their nails inflight (and flick them onto the passenger next to them), paint their toenails onboard, and go shirtless.

That doesn’t make it o.k. Bare feet on a plane is such an awful thing to do to the rest of the passengers in the cabin that a passenger with smelly feet once drove another so nuts that he got stabbed on arrival in the parking lot.