Tell me about your most unpleasant and/or scary airline flight

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I haven’t flown all that often, and none of them were particularly scary. The worst was coming home from a holiday in Thailand. It was a package tour, where I flew to Bangkok, spent three days there, then to Pataya by coach. Outward journey not too bad.

REturn journey was worse. First of all, I had to get up before dawn to catch the coach. The coach went to several hotels picking up passengers. That took a couple of hours. Then a long road journey back to Bangkok. The flight was delayed,another few hours hanging around in the terminal. Then the flight itself Bangkok, to London Heathrow was pretty long. A routine flight with no problems, but the boredom was excruciating. The constant whine of the engines gave me a headache. I was desperately tired, but could not rest. I could not enjoy the inflight movie, or read.

We arrived at Heathrow in the middle of a storm. The plane was shaken about and struck by lightning a few times. This did not worry me at all. I was just glad the ordeal was all over. The whole journey took a bit more than 24 hours.

22

A red-eye across the U.S. I was in the aisle seat. The man in the seat across the aisle from me became very agitated. He started saying some very unsettling things about the knives he had in his bag. The flight attendants were fantastic. They spoke to the man very calmly and reassured him that everything was fine. They moved the passenger sitting next to him and a male flight attendant sat next to the guy for the rest of the flight. I would imagine that the passengers who were not in the immediate vicinity remained blissfully unaware of what was going on. Naturally, I didn’t get a wink of sleep but I came away from that experience with tremendous respect for the job that flight attendants do. They aren’t just waiters/waitresses in the sky.

That flight happened about 6 months before 9/11. I wonder how it all would have been handled in the post-9/11 world.

23

An Irishman was flying from Dublin to NYC in a huge 4-engine jet. About an hour into the flight, the captain came on and said, “Folks, we’ve had a little anomaly with our #3 engine, so we’re shutting it down to be cautious. We’re in no danger but it will make us about a half-hour later in arrival.”

The Irishman grumbles but says nothing.

An hour later, the captain comes on and says “Well, some of you may have noticed a little vapor from the #1 engine… it’s no problem, but we’re shutting it down to be safe. This will make us about an hour late to our destination. Sorry.”

The Irishman rolls his eyes at the ceiling and curses quietly.

Halfway through the flight, the captain comes on again. "Ladies and gentlemen - in twenty years of flying, I’ve never had this happen. We lost power in our #2 engine. We are perfectly safe - the #4 is running strong and it will get us there in good style. It will make us about three hours late overall, though.

The Irishman blew up. “God dammit,” he roared, “If the last one goes out, we’ll be up here all feckin’ day!”

24

My most scary experience was in a private plane with my fully-qualified mate flying me around the English country-side (well away from all major airports.)
We were coming in to land with permission at a ‘local airport’ (actually just a field with a hut as the control tower), when an idiot decided to taxi onto the runway (without clearing it with the controller in the hut.)
My mate calmly told the controller “I am aborting landing” and duly flew upwards on full power.
We were fine, but the idiot got into a lot of trouble.

Another mate had a very unpleasant experience - he was on a UK - Australia flight which refuelled at Kabul, Afghanistan.
As the plane was on final approach, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan reached the airport.
The passengers were held for a week, then released.

25

Annnnnd that’s why the fine print on the back says, “…acts of God, war or insurrection, natural disasters…”

26

Returning to the US from England. Waited in the airport for a couple of hours because of unspecified delays. Then they told us the plane needed service and they were getting the spare plane out. This thing was falling apart. A row of seats was marked off with yellow tape. As we flew overhead compartment doors were popping open, the whole plane rattled, interior lights were going off and on. The attendants were obviously as concerned with the flight as the passengers. The landing was smooth, but looking at the passengers you would have thought it was a white knuckle affair.

27

One memorable experience happened so fast there was no time to be scared. About twenty years ago I was on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco. After several hours in uneventful flight we started descending steeply. Then the pilot came on the intercom: “No time to explain but we have to make an unexpected landing in Sacramento.” Less than a minute later we were on the ground.

We found out that because of unusual wind conditions in the Bay Area that had started after we left Chicago, the pilot was concerned he didn’t have enough fuel on board, so he landed in Sacramento to refuel.

ETA: As you can imagine, the flight finally arrived very late.

28

I was moments from touchdown in Atlanta when my flight banked sharply and the pilot accelerated sharply and climbed away. I was looking out the window and it looked like the wingtip nearly hit the runway, we were that low. I was thrust back into my seat hard.

After a few minutes we were back up in a holding pattern and the pilot came on the intercom to explain. He apologized, stating that another plane decided to use our runway.

29

All of them. I hate flying.

Had a real rough ride from The Big Island to Maui. Scared the shit out of me. I was in high school and sitting next to my friend. I had to act cool so he wouldn’t know I was scared. I had my fingers dug into the armrest and the belt about ready to cut me in half. 30 years later we were talking about it and he said he was scared shitless, too, but didn’t want me to find out! :smiley:

Got stuck on the runway in Dallas during a thunderstorm. The guy next to me was like a 400lb cartoon character. The way he was acting, you would have never imagined he’d ever been on a plane or even out of his house, ever. Real Strange.

Screw flying. I’ll drive.

30

One Air Serbia flight one of the crew left the cockpit. I distinctly recognized him as the loud-mouth obnoxious, drunk from a party the night before. The plane had already left the ground.

31

My high school group was flying out from NYC to London, about half an hour over the Atlantic in a two-engine jet, when the port engine caught fire. We had to turn back and get on a new plane, which delayed us several hours, but hey - better than being dead.

I remember reading a political memoir about the 1984 Democratic presidential race. The Mondale plane went through so severe a storm over Iowa that the flight attendants were screaming and throwing up. Now that would be alarming!

32

For some reason, I’ve always been somewhat phobic about flying, even before I’d ever flown. I’ve had some pretty bad flights, though none so turbulent as some described by other posters here. My first-ever flight kind of set the tone, though:

I was fresh out of college, and had a job interview in another state. The company arranged for me to fly out to the interview from the airport closest to me. Said airport technically had two strips, one of which had been unused long enough to have fallen into disrepair. (The whole place was abandoned not long after.) The one regional flight leaving that day was at ~5:00 AM, so I had a long drive in the rain before dawn, ending in following tiny signs for a couple of miles through dense woods until I saw the lights of the airfield.

The carriage awaiting me was an old twin-engine turboprop. I didn’t (and don’t) know squat about planes, but I was told the turboprop part, and the “old” was obvious. My misgivings deepened, but I was there, and had to be in another state that day, so I gritted my teeth and climbed aboard.

I was alone on the plane. That struck me as strange, but having never flown before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I stowed my overnight bag and sat down to wait, listening to the rain pattering on the window. I waited long enough to start thinking creepy pre-dawn thoughts. (Had something happened? Had they cancelled the flight and forgotten I was there?) I jumped when the pilot finally came aboard, just as the rain stopped pattering and started clicking instead. He started doing pilot-y things, which offered some comfort, until I realized that I had no way to tell if he did them all wrong.

It was very surreal. Just me and the pilot. Were they really going to fly this thing hundreds of miles just for me? No, no–it turned out there were other passengers, they were just running late, apparently because one of them was being obstreperous. Not because he was plane-phobic, like me, but because he wasn’t eager to go on trial. You see, the airline had a prisoner transport contract, and the other passengers were a murder suspect and a couple of police guards. That was it. Me, a murderer, and some cops. Plus the pilot, who was ignoring us all, and the copilot, who turned up at the last minute. Taking off in a battered old plane into what was rapidly turning into an ice storm.

Quick, count the movie clichés.

The ride was…rough. I stayed buckled in for the duration, and later found a couple of bruises from the belt and the seat arms. The prisoner and one of the cops got very audibly sick. I didn’t, but probably only because I hadn’t eaten anything. The best that can be said of it is that we didn’t crash, no one got murdered, and we arrived only an hour late.

After that, I got to drive halfway across a strange city filled with more people than my home state and have a job interview.

(If anyone waded through all that and somehow wants more, I can talk about the flight where I got drunk on moonshine or the flight with the broken ass.)

33

Replace “Atlanta” with “St Louis” and you posted the exact story I was going to post, nearly verbatim!

34

Only been on an airplane twice. Never,ever again!

35

Here you go.

I still remember everyones head flying up when we slammed onto that runway.

36

Way back in 1994 when I was working on my Masters myself and another guy went down to Atlanta for a week long training academy that we got credits for attending plus were paid to go to by our agencies.

After the last day we had to check out of our rooms at noon but out flight out wasn’t until 7pm. So we took the shuttle to the airport and sat at airport bars drinking (and drinking, and drinking…!)

When we finally got on the plane we were both higher than the plane was ever going to be! But a big storm moved in and take offs were delayed. We stayed on the runway for over an hour and were 23rd in line for take off.

Fact is, you can’t buy beer you can only rent it! We both had to piss like crazy and the flight attendants were adamant that we stay in our seat. After extensive arguing we were warned we were close to getting booted off the flight. Can’t tell you how much trouble we’d been in with our employers had that happened, even though at the time we were technically off the clock. So we shut the hell up and sat there while our eyeballs (and other balls) turned yellow!

Not the fault of the airline or anyone else but us, though.

Once in the air, flying above the clouds during an electrical storm is real funky. Ever see lightning go upwards toward your location? It’s trippy.

37

My wife begged me to fly up to Timbuktu with her (we were posted to the embassy in Bamako, Mali). I told her that having flown on Russian built aircraft in the past had instilled a healthy fear and loathing for them, and that the added thrill of traveling on one that had been “maintained” by local mechanics and flown by a Malian pilot wasn’t sweetening the deal. I steadfastly refused to capitulate and asked her to please not go, but she was determined to do so and so she and the embassy doctor decided to go together.

The plane left in clear weather, but by the time they arrived in the vicinity of Timbuktu, the wind was bouncing the plane all over the sky and there was a sandstorm. Instead of turning back, the pilot decided to land. The subsequent descent was the most terrifying moments my wife had ever experienced. The rattles and bangs and the racket from the hydraulics were deafening as the plane pitched and yawed all over the place, and she never saw the ground until they slammed down onto the runway.

To my credit, I never said “I told you so”.

38

I was flying into Ketchikan AK in a DeHaviland Beaver. I was in the copilot’s seat and we were just about to start descending to the water for landing. Memory is a weird thing and I only remember little snippets here and there. The first thing I remember is looking down and seeing all the dust blowing up over the water and all the little waves on the ocean getting blown into a froth. I’m not a pilot but I had the headset on and I remember the ATC guy calling out wind speed in knots 35, 40, 45, 50…ect. I remember the pilot trying to turn us around and get us the hell out of there when the wind hit. My last image was us sideways, I looked at the pilot and he had a knee propped up against the door and was wrenching on the yoke , pulling up on one side with the crook of his arm and pressing down on the other side with his forearm and shoulder.

Needless to say I never did get to figure out if a Beaver on floats will do a barrel roll.

39

When I was first learning to skydive I sometimes had that problem. The long slow climb gave me too much time to think about what I was actually doing. Eventually I got used to it and even dozed off a time or two on the ride to jump altitude.

So it really got my attention the time the airplane engine cracked a cylinder head right after takeoff (I’ve told this story before; here it is again). We lost most of our power and stopped climbing- we were slowly descending, in fact. The pilot asked if we could jump out but we were only 500 ft. above the ground and that’s too low for me. The parachute would probably open but below 1,000 ft. my odds are better if I stay with the plane (or so I was taught). None of the other skydivers in the plane wanted to bail out either.

The pilot did a fine job of slowly bringing the plane around with what little power we had and landing back at the airport. But it was a scary few minutes, helplessly sitting there with a parachute I couldn’t use.

40

Qantas. Melbourne-Sydney-LAX. 1990.

Smoking was still allowed (in the rear). And I was in the rear seats of a 747 where you have only 2 seats on the sides. There was nobody sitting next to me. Which meant that someone from the rest of the plane would come and sit next to me, smoke their cigarette, only to be replaced by yet another smoker. And this besides the usual smoking going on. Mind - this is a 14 hour flight. I spent much of it lying down on the two seats. Lot of grumpy smokers.