With all the crappy things happening with air travel recently, I thought I’d try to lighten up the whole miserable experience a little and talk about humorous stuff you’ve done or seen whilst flying. Might ease the misery a little.
I’ll start:
The first class cabin overheads tend to fill up rather quickly on most airplanes. This is because you only have a very limited area to find an empty space versus the whole back of the plane and thus it is considered very bad form for someone in back to shove their stuff in the first class overhead and go on to the back.
One time, I saw a guy put his carryon in the last available space, then go on back. The lady behind him, who actually did have a seat in first class, looked at his recediing back for a moment, then calmly took his carryon out of the space, put hers up there, and then took his to the flight attendant and said, “The overheads are full. Guess you’ll have to gate check my carryon.”
I did this one, yes me, I did: I was on an ATR-72 turboprop going to Atlanta when we had a bird strike on one of the wheelwell doors. Only no one knew at the time what that “Thump!” was. The pilot thought that we might have blown a tire just as the plane rotated. Nothing could be done about it, so we proceeded to Atlanta and made a precautionary emergency landing. Well, we took our pens & pencils out of our pockets and all that and assumed the crash position and drifted towards the runway. Pilot held the bird off the runway as long as humanly possible, bleeding off all the airspeed he could. The plane was very, very quiet right then. Channeling Lloyd Bridges iin Airplane!, LiveOnAPlane announces into the silence, “I picked a baaaad day to give up smoking!” Cracked 'em up, I did.
Two passengers have boarding passes for the same seat. It happens sometimes, no big deal, but one of the passengers is going on to to the flight attendant about how this is just terrible service, the computers should know better than assign two people to the same seat, he is so tired of this crappy service, etc. Flight attendant looks at their boarding passes, hands his back to him and says, “Sir, you’re on the wrong plane.” Guy: :o
I’m on planes a lot, but am drawing a blank on anything that is directly humorous, maybe because I generally see the humorous in everything - I assume most people wouldn’t think it’s funny to have a kid whacking you in the back of the head (on a two hour flight from DC to Tampa, after a transatlantic hop from Frankfurt), but I was so tired at that point that I found it hysterical. I admired the moxie of that kid to keep it up for two hours, and the ability of his mom to ignore her kid for the whole flight.
I was on a long, miserable flight a few months ago. But at least the people I was sitting next to were nice and fun to talk to. The woman sitting next to me was a little clueless, though. A bit of an airhead.
Every now and then I’d see something interesting out the window and point it out to her. Usually it was mountains or lakes. I remember specifically pointing out the Great Salt Lake. She oohed and ahhed. As we were coming in for a landing, she looked out the window and said “That’s a really big lake. I wonder which one it is.”
My strangest experience was sitting next to a woman with about four birds in cardboard boxes. Of course, she had to keep looking at them to see if they were OK, and eventually one escaped, and started flying round the cabin. She did get it back, however.
The next strangest was being on a plane that nearly landed at San Francisco (SFO) after fling from Australia. I was in a window seat, and saw that after a normal approach to the airport, when we were no more than a metre or two above the runway, the plane started ascending again. After circling around, a few minutes later we finally landed at SFO the normal way. The pilot explained to us that they’d been told to abort the landing because here was something still on the runway ahead of us.
In the late '90s, I was on vacation in Italy, going to depart back to the US. At this particular airport, in Milan, you checked in at your gate like normal, walked down the jetway onto the tarmac, and took a little shuttle to the plane itself. My husband and I were settled into our seats, when a woman in the aisle, another American, said that I was in the wrong seat, and named my seat number. I told her no, my boarding pass had me assigned to that seat number. She showed me her boarding pass, and I informed her that this was a flight to JFK, not Dulles. (I don’t remember the exact destination airports involved, but that’s close - you get the idea.) She blanched, confirmed this with a flight attendant, and hurried off the plane.
I speak barely any Italian - we used phrase books and mini-translation dictionaries a lot - but finding your gate in an Italian airport isn’t that hard. I can only assume that she had a brainfart and so did the flight attendant, or she was at an adjacent gate, there was no shuttle there immediately (being at the plane dropping off passengers) and she ran over and got on ours.
I was at SFO checking in for my flight back to BOS. I got to the terminal where USAirways was and swiped my credit card in one of the kiosks. “404 Flight not found.” Huh? I swiped it again. “404 Flight still not found.” WTF. Another swipe. “404, Flight still not found, dumbass.” As I was running a little late, I started to panic. I stood in line to talk to a flesh and blood human, but the line was huge. I prepared to plead my case to the person, and so produced the e-mail printout that had my itinerary on it. See? Right there! Flight 1419, Dprt 10:00am, Arrv 8:32pm, United Airlines.
I was going to a meeting in London, so was on the short British Airways Edinburgh to London hop (one hour flight). I got the dreaded middle seat, and of course got two fat business men on either side reading broadsheet newspapers.
Then it started up in the row behind me. Young child, kicking the back of my seat, arguing constantly with their older sibling in the window seat. Their mother in the aisle seat was oblivious, because she was too busy fussing the screaming baby on her lap.
When we landed at Heathrow, and the kid behind me was still kicking my seat, and still yelling about not being able to see out of the window and so on, her brother in the window seat turns to her and says “That’s us in London now. Now we get off and get on a really big plane to get us to Los Angeles.” Suddenly my irritation and anger at my one hour ordeal turned to hilarity as I pictured whoever gets the row in front of them for a flight of that length…
You didn’t say you had to be a passenger on the plane. I’m a flight instructor, and therefore see lots of funny stuff while flying. Two incidents with students still make me laugh.
One form of navigation we use is called VOR, which involves ground stations we track with an instrument in the cockpit. Not hard once you get the hang of it, but it’s easy to make certain mistakes early on. One student made a typical mistake which caused him to fly in the opposite direction he intended to go.
I waited a few minutes to see if he’d catch it. Then, as casually as I could, I asked, “So Fred - how long do you figure it will take us to reach the VOR on this heading?”
He re-examined the instruments and realized we were going the wrong way. I explained his mistake, and said we would obviously never reach the VOR that way. Fred said, “We’d get there eventually - we’d just have to go once around the Earth.”
Another time I took a student on a navigation flight to another airport in busy airspace. His workload was high, and he was very tired by the time we were approaching our home field, which has no control tower. About ten miles out he keyed the microphone, intending to ask which runway people were using. What actually came out of his mouth was, “Which way is the airport pointing?”
My best friend was seated next to a guy who insisted on hogging the armrest. Unbelievably, she happened to be reading a magazine article stating that more guys than women will hog the armrest on an airplane, in a theater, etc. She showed him the article and they had a good laugh.
Not so funny for me, but it was for everyone behind me.
I was with my family on a flight from Newark to Seattle, widebody jet. I was seated on the aisle in the center section with my 4 year old nephew next to me, near the front of coach. Nearing the end of our long flight, my sister asked if I could get my nephew’s toy out of her bag over my head. I got up & opened the bin and my nephew hopped into my seat, standing in front of me. I rummaged around in the bag for a few minutes, unable to find the thing, and suddently my nephew yelled “Uncle corkboard!” and punched me in the nuts.
The 150 or so passengers facing this little episode got a big kick out of it.
Secondhand story, related by a cabbie to my husband and I while he was driving us to O’Hare: He had a distracted, somewhat abrupt passenger who got in the cab and told him to drive to O’Hare. So most cabbies will ask you, once they’re within the airport grounds, what airline you’re on (and sometimes if you’re going domestic or international) so they know what terminal to head for. The passenger told him, “Southwest.”
Southwest doesn’t serve O’Hare. They fly out of Midway, on the other side of Chicago. After a bit of yelling, the passenger urged him to get to Midway ASAP. (I don’t remember the rest of the story exactly - IIRC it was feasible but probably not likely that they arrived in time for boarding the flight.)
A few years ago, I was flying from Philadelphia to St. Louis on a jet with a configuration of seats 2 on the left side and 3 on the right. I was in my usual aisle seat on the right side. In the row behind me in the two seats on the left side were two men arguing. Apparently the man in the window seat wanted to put the armrest between them down. The man in the aisle seat kept protesting that it was uncomfortable for him to put it down and wanted it left up. Eventually a flight attendant walked by and the guy in the aisle seat says very loudly, “Miss, can I please move to another seat, this guy next to me thinks my ass is too big to fit in the seat, and won’t let me keep the armrest up!” Luckily, the flight wasn’t full and she found him another seat.
Similar to one of the stories by the OP, on another flight I was in first class, and a couple that were seated in seats 1A and 1B arrived on the plane well after everyone else had boarded. The husband opens the overhead bin, which was full and proceeds to take out one of the roller bags that is up there and just sit in in the aisle and put their luggage up there in its place. The guy in 1C realizes what is happening and exclaims, “Hey, that’s my bag!”. The husband in 1B says, “Well its in our overhead space.” and sits down. The flight attendant in first class rushes up and offers to put the guys bag in seat 1C in a little closet up front reserved for the crew.
My boss was telling us about her last flight; the person sitting next to her had a large stuffed animal in her lap. An adult person. Who talked to the stuffed animal throughout the flight. And put a blanket on it to keep it from getting cold.
No idea if this has ever really happened on an airplane, but it’s believable…
A young rambunctious boy spots the name of the aircraft while boarding. Suddenly, his incessant “When are we going? When are we going?” is replaced with something much more amusing to say, even if he doesn’t know how to pronounce it. As he and his family make their way down the aisle, he starts yelling “Boing! Boing! Boing!” Mom leans down and says “Be silent!”
I once was in the aisle seat on a very full flight, and the older woman in the window seat was quietly talking to herself on and off during the whole trip. This was to the point where the middle-seat passenger and I exchanged glances a few times; when I could make out any of what she was saying, it was like she was talking to someone who wasn’t there.
Whn we arrived and started to stand up, she leaned down and pulled a cat carrier out from under her seat. It all fell into place so abruptly that I blurted, “Oh, you have a CAT!?” The middle seat person and I then got into a fit of giggling, and I was so embarrassed that I turned to the older woman and said, “I’m so sorry; I confess that I thought you had been talking to yourself.” She was a very good sport and laughed about it.
Subsequently, at baggage claim, I saw her standing with her granddaughter. The girl caught my eye at that point, and she broke out in a goofy grin, exaggeratedly pointed at her grandmother, and started twirling her finger next to her head. I went over and sheepishly apologized again, but they both seemed to think it was very funny.
Having someone else’s baggage thrown off the plane isn’t good form either. “My anti-nausea pills were in there. Blargh on your lap” would be my response.
I’d do my best to have her arrested. And I’d throw up on her. I generally have no problems with my stomach when flying, but I’d come up with something.
Some guy must have stunk up the bathroom. A lady impatiently pushed past him to get in there. She back pedaled right back out. I nearly burst trying not to laugh out loud. That woman never did go back in there that flight.