Chicago-Based Airline Has No Idea How They Got Onboard

Things just keep getting buggier onboard commercial airliners... and we're not talking about the passengers who "booed" themselves out of an American Airlines flight from Miami last weekend. No, we mean actual bugs.

At least one wayward tick is to blame for delaying a recent United Airlines flight from Denver to Des Moines, IA, reports The Associated Press. Flight 1178 was delayed nearly six hours at DEN, while United attempted to locate a deloused airliner.

The incident began when a passenger on the inbound flight from Washington, DC told a flight attendant she found a tick in economy class. Somewhere "between one and three" ticks were discovered, the AP reports United spokeswoman Robin Urbanski as saying (so... let's call it two? -- Ed.) and no ticks were found on passengers.

Urbanski added the airline doesn't know how the ticks got onboard the plane, or what type of ticks they were. "I don't know if we'll be able to find that out," she said. "When possible, we do try to look into those type of things, and hopefully try to look for its origin."

Though perhaps lacking the horror-audience box office cachet of snakes on a plane -- or, for that matter, mice, bees, or scorpions -- blood-sucking ticks can transmit a number of illnesses, including Lyme disease, to humans.

For what its worth, the "tick plane" started out Tuesday in Chicago... a locale where it's not all-that-uncommon to find ticks, especially in outlying rural areas.

Even after United tracked down a replacement A319 to ferry the 107 passengers to Des Moines, the troubles didn't stop... as that plane was stuck on the ground in Colorado Springs due to thunderstorms between COS and DEN.

FMI: www.united.com, www.tickinfo.com/