Vanilla Ice Says Quarantined Emirates Plane Was 'Chaos': Report

QUEENS, NY -- Vanilla Ice was happy to be home safe at his Palm Beach mansion Wednesday night after what had been, at the very least, a chaotic day of travel from Dubai and then New York City.

The rapper, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, was one of 521 passengers stranded aboard Emirates Flight 203 from Dubai into John F. Kennedy International Airport, which was quarantined for about three and a half hours after 106 people onboard reported flulike symptoms.

"It was chaos right when we landed," Vanilla Ice told WPBF-TV in West Palm Beach, Florida, after arriving home from the ordeal.

The "Ice Ice Baby" rapper live-tweeted his experience from the plane to his 348,000 Twitter followers, and even shared footage to Facebook of the scene happening outside his window.

"So I just landed in New York coming back from Dubai and now I'm stuck on the runway with 1000 police, ambulances, fire trucks, this is crazy," he wrote in a Facebook post.

The 50-year-old entertainer also tweeted he was "happy I'm up top" on the double-decker airbus, saying he believed most sick passengers were on the bottom floor.

The plane, which landed in JFK at about 9 a.m., was quarantined after 106 passengers reported feeling sick with coughs, high fevers and vomiting, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Flyers were stuck on the plane for about three-and-a-half hours while CDC public health officers and other emergency responders screened each one for flulike symptoms.

A total of 19 people were ultimately deemed sick, with 10 of them hospitalized and nine refusing medical attention, said Eric Phillips, spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio. All of their symptoms so far point to the flu as the underlying cause of the mystery illness, he said.

The New York City Health Department confirmed Thursday morning that most lab tests done on sick passengers' respiratory symptoms revealed "common viruses such as influenza and the common cold," but said some tests for other viruses were inconclusive.

"This is not unusual when testing, but it means we have to re-test some samples today and expect to have full results in the afternoon," a Health Department spokesman said.

Vanilla Ice told WPBF-TV he learned of the "health issue" from the pilot shortly after the plane landed, but it was the scene outside his window that made him realize just how serious it was.

"The pilot comes on, he says, 'Well, we got a little health issue. People are sick,'" he told the news station.

"When we started looking out the windows, we were like, 'This is much bigger than what the pilot just made it out to be. This is real serious."

Vanilla Ice said he and other first-class passengers were shuttled down from the top deck of the airbus through a special exit to avoid infection.

The ordeal turned into a punch line for some of the rapper's more dedicated fans, who responded to his tweets from the plane with tongue-in-cheek lyrics from his hit song, "Ice Ice Baby."

"All right stop, quarantine and listen Ice is back with a brand new affliction," said Twitter user @pennyanderson.

Another Twitter user asked the rapper if he could confirm "whether this disease is killin' your brain like a poisonous mushroom?"

But the ordeal was no joke for Vanilla Ice, who told WPTF-TV the chaos surrounding the quarantine had begun to worry him and his fellow passengers.

“When you’re up there for that long and looking out the window at all the cops and everybody, you’re just starting to panic,” he said.

Lead photo by Matthew Elsmen/Getty Images