Worst In-Flight Experiences

In My Humble Opinion
1

First off, I know I will be soundly defeated by future posters but I want to hear it.

Flight from Johannesburg to NYC: 17 hours on an airplane (this counts a refueling stop in Dakkar—where they don’t let you off the plane).

Two women behind me were flying for the first time take advantage of complementary alcohol and get pretty sloshed. They got pretty loud and keep laughing at the in-flight entertainment. One kept bumping the attendant call button and having them come and explain that the little button with the picture of a person on it wasn’t supposed to be pushed except in the case of an emergency.

Across the isle was an elderly man with saint like patience. Directly behind him sat his wife who would have driven be to seek annulment within hours. A snippet of dialogue:

All announcements out of the cockpit where greeted with a loud repeat of the gist of the announcement. Those of us in the area learned from the volume endowed but socially oblivious woman all the details, impressions and random associated thoughts of this woman’s trip to South Africa.

In the seat in front of me was a person who spent the trip being sick as a dog. The attendants were kept busy shuttling air sickness bags in an out of the area. The resulting smell was revolting.

The nice bit was the guy next to me. He curled up didn’t say a word, slept the whole time. Thank God for small blessings.

To make matters worse was the added time. It had taken 8 hours (airport and flight time) to get to J-Burg, I was looking at an 8 hour layover in NY, 5 more hours of flight time and another 90 minutes of layover before getting home. Add to that I was looking forward (HA!) to returning to the eastern hemisphere after four days.

2

Back in the early 90s, I was flying over to Amsterdam and had to change planes at JFK. That evening, it was icy, and a plane at LaGuardia had skidded off the runway and into the water. So, all flights were grounded until a bunch of de-icing was done. In the meantime, they had CNN on in the cabin. Every few minutes, the death toll would creep up. We spent something like 4 hours on the tarmac like that. After a passenger revolt, they began serving drinks. When we were finally cleared for takeoff, the whole plane cheered, utterly unconcerned with the icy conditions.
Another time, I was flying into Tampa, and there was wicked turbulence. At one point, I swear to God, the plane must have dropped a hundred feet and turned sideways. The pilot righted the plane, then came on the PA and apologized for the “bumpy air”, and they handed out free drink coupons (they weren’t serving at the time because of the turbulence and being close to landing).

3

That would be me. Unless I’m actually at the controls I tend to doze off pretty quickly.

The only less than optimal experience was on my first trip to New Orleans. There was a T-storm over MSY with loads of turbulence and wind sheer. Now, I find turbulence fun. It adds some spice to a boring flight. But the other passengers didn’t share my enthusiasm. And they were bothered by the lightning bolts passing close abeam. (I couls swear we took one on the wingtip.) The bad part was that we had to divert to Baton Rouge. Since the airline didn’t have a contract there, we were not allowed to leave the aircraft for (IIRC) four hours. The toilets were full, there was no air conditioning, they were running out of airsickness bags (apparently some people were upset by the turbulence), and people were angry. I really felt sorry for the guy whose final destination was Baton Rouge. He had to wait with the rest of us, fly back to New Orleans, and then go back to the capital.

4

Not strictly an in flight experience although I was on a plane. Last time I flew I brilliantly allocated myself a window seat although I like to sit on the aisle. When I got to my seat there was a woman in the aisle seat but the centre seat was empty. I settled into the window seat and thought, “I hope no-one is coming to take the centre seat.”

Suddenly I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. I was panic stricken - shallow breathing, panting really, my heart pounding and starting to break out in a sweat. I quickly had myself convinced that I had to get off that plane. I tried to calm down and simply couldn’t. After a few minutes of this psychological torture I began to work out the logistics of getting out to the aisle, retrieving my bag from the overhead and grovellingly asking the flight staff to get me off the plane.

And then I realised that once I started getting up that would be the end of it. I would be left behind and would miss the Dylan concert in Melbourne. I convinced myself to settle down, close my eyes and relax, pay attention to my breathing and get in the moment. By the time we were taxiing I was fine.

The surprising thing about this incident is that I am a carefree flier and have never had a moments worry before. In fact a few years ago I flew back from Brisbane sitting between 2 women who were terrified - the weather conditions were dreadful and the plane was all over the place on approach. Although we were all strangers we held hands and I am pretty sure I made the whole thing as painless as possible for them.

The other memorable realisation from my experience was how physically debilitating a bit of fear can be, no matter how inappropriate it is.

5

Just reading these stories makes me want to take some Klonopin.

6

Not really in flight, but I spent nearly 24 hours on a broken airplane on the ground in Seoul while we waited for a new engine to be flown in from Alaska. We were not allowed off the airplane and they spent all night replacing the engine with us on board. We then flew to San Francisco.

Prior to the engine failure causing our aborted takeoff roll, we had a discrepency in the bags and everyone had to go out to the tarmac to claim thier checked bags. An army truck picked up the bag that nobody claimed.

7

I was flying down to Miami to catch a connecting flight to South America. It was an uneventful flight until we were about halfway down, when suddenly the plane went into a steep dive for what seemed like and eternity, then levelled out. The pilot then came on the intercom to announce that the cabin pressurization equipment had gone out, and they had to get down to 10,000 feet or so in a hurry. Especially since the redundant cabin pressurization equipment was known not to be working prior to the flight.

Before the dive, it had been a normal flight, lots of casual conversation, the occasional laugh, whatever. After that the entire cabin was silent. Everyone was quietly paranoid. So we were flying along, in slightly bumpy weather, as it was summer and we were flying through the afternoon weather along the Florida coast. Lots of clouds and air pockets and what not, and no altitude to avoid them.

That was when we hit a decent pocket of air and the plane went “SLAM!”, with a nice little stomach jolting drop. At that point I heard some women behind me burst into tears, some others begin to pray the rosary, etc. Fortunately, after that, the flight was fairly uneventful.

I have a lot of stories like this; I fly alot. I’ve also know people killed on flights, involved in fatal crashes (but survived), and very near crashes (ice on wings, plane went into a spin, amazing Delta pilot saved the plane). So my stuff seems relatively tame to me in comparison.

8

I’ve flown at least a hundred times, and I’ve never had a completely awful “write home about it” bad experience like that. I can’t recall anyone barfing or anything, just getting annoyed that some kid’s mother wasn’t stopping him from repeatedly kicking my seat from behind.

9

The fact is, the overwhelming majority of flights are ‘nothing to write home about’.

10

Last summer, after an unplanned extra day spent in Atlanta, due to weather making us miss our flight to Rio, we were ecstatic when the boarding agent called us to the counter at the minute the flight was leaving to tell us that there were exactly five scattered seats available for my family of five. Totally awesome, especially after biting our nails to the nubs for the prior few hours on standby.

We thought everything was done and we could finally relax.

A few hours into the flight, when we had a belly full of plane food and had been asleep for an hour or two, the cabin lights came on.
The captain got on the PA and apologized for turning the lights on, “but I thought you folks should know what’s going on…”

He told us that we were over Venezuela and that Santo Domingo air traffic control had just advised them that the air traffic control radar system in Brazil had shut down and that Brazil was turning away all flights – Brazilian airspace was closed.

“Sorry for the bad news. We’ll be back in Atlanta in 3 and a half hours.”

Great moaning from the passengers.

This was at the time of the Pan American games and we had many fans, competitors, and even judges from all over the world on our plane. One guy was supposed to judge an event the next day.

After an hour of groaning and grumbling, the captain came back on and told us “Good news – Brazilian airspace just opened back up.”
But we didn’t have enough fuel. He then went on to tell us how we were going to land in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to refuel and we were going to make a run for it.

We did. And we landed in Rio about four hours late. Half of our luggage was lost.

The return flight was totally uneventful, thankfully.

11

Entirely of my own doing, having spent the previous night drinking whisky with a cousin. Flying with a hangover is bad. Flying out of Turin, where it would appear the way to gain height before crossing the Alps is basically spiralling upwards, was baaad.

12

We weren’t on a plane, but it’s still a bad flight experience:

Four years ago we flew down to Waco to visit some friends who were at Baylor. We had a lovely time, although we were startled by the smallness of the Waco airport. The time came for departure. We had a tearful farewell with our friends, they dropped us off at the (very small) airport, we checked in, and waited. And waited.
The Waco airport has exactly one gate. We were, oh, fifty feet from it, and could see it clearly. There were no planes. Ther ewas pretty much no-one else in the airport.

We waited.

A plane!
Two people got on it. It left.

The time came for our plane to depart, and it still hadn’t arrived. There were no announcements. I’m not sure there even was a P.A. system. We went back to the check-in desk, found someone, and asked them where the hell our plane was.

“Oh, yeah. I was wonderin’ what to do about that.”

Wondering what to do about the plane not having arrived?

“Yeah. It says it’s rainin’ in Houston, so the plane might not come.”

Look, we have a connecting flight out of Houston to Toronto in forty-five minutes. Are there any planes going to be arriving today that will take us somewhere we can get a flight home from?

“Well, in five hours there’s one goin’ through Austen. There’d be a ten-minute layover, and then you could get to Chicago… but the planes are in different terminals. If we’d known you needed to get to get to Austen we could’ve put you on that plane that left two hours ago.”
After a twenty-minute wrangling session, we concluded that it was impossible to leave Waco that day. We called our friends. They came and picked us up. We were not given dinner compensation, breakfast compensation, or an offer of a hotel.

The next day we managed to fly to Houston.

When we got home, Mr. Lissar had a half-hour screaming session with the airline service people, and got a princely $50 gift card for our inconvenience. We spent half of it on dinner, and the other half refused to work a couple of days later.
We’re never, ever taking that airline again, or going to Waco.

13

Most of my flights have been rather uneventful. I guess the worst, at least in terms of sheer mind-numbing exhaustion, was the one i took from Sydney to Manchester, England in the early 1990s. The Australia-UK trip is a test of endurance at the best of times, involving almost a full day on the plane, but this was worse.

The day of the flight, there was a airplane refuellers’ strike in Australia, and we took off without a full load of fuel, so the first delay was a detour to Cairns, on the north-east coast, to fill the tanks. That added a couple of hours to the journey.

The main stop-over for our flight was Singapore, where we were supposed to get off the plane, wait a couple of hours, and then board another plane for the leg to London. But, due to some sort of problems elsewhere, our London flight was going to be about 7 hours late, leaving us with about 9 hours to wait in Singapore.

We had arrived at about 11pm Singapore time, so the wait would essentially be overnight. Qantas ferried us to hotels so we could at leas get a few hours sleep before coming back early the next morning. The only thing i remember about that trip to Singapore was the heat and humidity that hit you in the face like a wet blanket as you left the airport, even though it was almost midnight.

Anyway, we got off he ground the next morning, and settled in for an uneventful 13 hour (i think) flight to Heathrow. Our plane was due to drop off most of the passengers at Heathrow, and then fly on to Manchester. But once we landed in London, we were informed that there was a problem with one of the engines, and that it would need to be looked at before we took off again. So we sat in the plane for about three and a half hours while they sorted out the problem, before taking off for the very short jump to Manchester. We landed about 37 hours after our Sydney take-off.

All this would have been bad enough if i were flying by myself, or with a friend. But i was flying with the wife and children of a friend of mine (the friend was already in the UK). The kids were aged 2, and 6 months. Try a 37 hour trip under those conditions and see if you ever want to have children.

14

Well, this isn’t a bad story at all, but after the Waco one I wanted to stand up for tiny airports - flying out of Rockland, ME, which is a large trailer, I wanted to see if there was anything they could do to fix the fact that I only had half an hour in Boston. I had just come off of six days on a schooner. I took two showers in those six days. (One was the day before, for the benefit of my fellow travelers.) Because my flight out of Rockland was overbooked, anyway (overbooked? I never saw another soul the whole time!), he put me in a cab to Augusta to get a different flight and catch an earlier one in Boston, and he put me in first class from Boston to Charlotte! I actually got home two hours earlier, which is awesome when you’ve only had two showers in one week. So sometimes those little airports are absolutely the way to go. (He even let me leave my bag in the waiting room so I could take a sponge bath in the bathroom - I was kinda worried they’d throw my salty ass out of first class.)

15

The last time I flew, there was a pretty good t-storm and I swear I saw this ‘thing’ out on the wing tearing up the engin.

Nobody believed me!

16

This is more in line with the letter, rather than the spirit, of this thread but given that Hoverspeed used to refer to their hovercraft crossings of the English Channel as “flights”, here goes …

My worst hovercraft flight (taken because I didn’t much like aeroplane flights at the time - oh the irony!) was a Dover to Boulogne crossing in a force 8 gale. I think we were the first crossing for several hours, sort of “send 'em out and see what happens”.

We boinged fairly violently from one wave top to the next, or so it seemed, moving far more vertically than horizontally. If you had a window seat on the hovercraft the “skirt” was usually just below the floor level of the cabin, but on this occasion it was dropping out of sight and then ba-lumphing up about half-way up the window.

Worst of all, this was supposed to be a 35-minute crossing, and when we’d been bouncing around for an hour, I overheard one of the passengers ask a stewardess how much longer we had to go, and she replied “oh, we’re only halfway there”.

Good times! The best bit of taking the hovercraft was being in the departure lounge and watching it come up the ramp, and being able to put your head down on the floor and see right underneath it :eek: .

17

My worst was what shoudl have been a routine flight from Austin to Atlanta. Really bad turbulence. The pilot kept diverting north to try and avoid it and couldn’t. I was stuck in the back of the plane which I don’t like on good flight and wound up using the air sickness bags twice. It was horrible. The only saving grace was the college kid next to me who was very sweet about the whole horrible air sickness thing.

18

OK, you either needed to drink a lot less on that flight, or a lot more. I’m not sure which. :eek: :stuck_out_tongue:

19

My brother-in-law had an interesting experience on a DC-to-LA flight: Dinner had just been served when the 747 hit brief but violent turbulence. Some passengers and flight attendants were injured (none seriously, I believe). Everyone’s dinner tray was flung to the ceiling, and for the next hour or so lasagne, salad and such were dripping down into people’s hair. An unholy mess.

20

1984, I think. Olympic Airlines, London to Athens. Small seats, dirty plane, bad service, etc. But what really took the biscuit was when the meals came round. One dish fell off the cart and landed face down on the floor, and the stewardess scooped it up off the carpet back onto the plate, put it back on the trolley, and served it to someone a few yards further up! They didn’t bother to clean the mess left behind.