Worst In-Flight Experiences

In My Humble Opinion
41

Great stuff. Man, I love a good wallow. I suppose these are fairly ordinary as bad flights go, but here are a couple stories. Enjoy:

Flying TAAG Angolan Airlines Paris CDG-Luanda, sometime in the late '80s. Overnight flight, planned duration about 12 hours. Queen of the fleet was a 20-some-odd-year-old DC-8. I knew I was in for a rough time when a TAAG employee came through the departure lounge handing out food vouchers for an airport restaurant: no food aboard the flight, you see. Did I mention the flight was going to be about 12 hours?

I settle into my seat, and eye the cockroach slowly making its way up the cabin wall. We heave off into the air, and I lapse into a fitful sleep. Somewhere over a completely lightless North Africa, I feel the plane heel into a bank and a few minutes later the pilot announces that we have an unnamed ‘technical problem’ and are diverting to Lisbon, about three hours in the opposite direction to our destination. Apparently this was the only airport where TAAG had sufficient parts, or maybe credit, to effect repairs.

We duly arrive Lisbon at something like 1:30 in the morning, deplane, mill around in a deserted, unlit lounge under armed guard for an hour or two, then file back aboard and take off again. The rest of the flight goes more or less routinely until we’re couple hours out of Luanda, at which point it is announced that we will make an unscheduled stop in Libreville, Gabon to take on fuel. We finally make it into Luanda about 10 hours off schedule, which made it close to 24 hours without food and with limited fluids. And then, you’re in Luanda. Sheesh.

Last April, I was returning to from Paris to Houston, via Frankfurt, on Lufthansa. I really like the airline and their passenger service, and the little touches like the free postcards, but unfortunately there are two main drawbacks to flying with them: 1) having to go through all the security rigamarole in Frankfurt even if you are merely transiting to a connecting flight through the same bloody terminal; and b) the sadistic torture devices that are the economy-class seats on the carrier’s A340 aircraft. Seriously, most airplane seats are not exactly Laz-E-Boys, but for some reason I cannot abide Lufthansa’s; an hour into the flight and my back and bottom are both screaming for mercy, annoying the other passengers.

Frankfurt-Houston is about 11 hours normally. We make our way across the North Atlantic, cross into the States somewhere over Cleveland and seemingly crawl across Ohio. Simultaneously bored and in agony nearly to tears, I switch to the moving map on the seatback viddy display. Along about this time I notice that we have veered to the left of our planned route and appear to be heading straight for Memphis. After about 15 minutes we then make a ninety-degree right turn, and eventually rejoin our original route. No announcement is made concerning the maneuver.

Continuing on, we cross the Texas border, at which point the map display amusingly shows the plane symbol making three or four lazy circles over a large patch of nowhere. Still no announcements. I snag a passing flight attendant to ask, “Excuse me, are we diverting?”, which is answered with an edifying “Maybe”. Finally, the pilot comes on the intercom to say that due to severe thunderstorms we’re going into Dallas. Upon landing, we are shunted onto a taxiway where we sit for three.fricking.hours until we are finally given clearance into Houston. I don’t blame Lufthansa for the weather, but I just can’t take those goddam seats for 11 hours, much less 16. Never again.

42

When cockroaches board an aircraft that is totally devoid of food, you know you are in for a rough time.

:eek:

43

My worst in-flight experience was when we hit something just after take-off, there was smoke coming out of an engine, there were pieces coming off the engine, and that’s how the flight started… We didn’t land for 40 minutes. It was really bad.

Um, no, I wasn’t the pilot - this was a commercial flight and I was a passenger with my first flight lesson about 7 years in the future.

44

I’m lucky. The worst thing that ever happened to me on a flight was being served eggplant and then having to watch Shark Tale two or three times (hey, it was either that or that taxi cab movie with Queen Latifah and the SNL guy). The rest of the El-Al food was actually fairly decent, though.

HEY! :mad: It’s Chair Force! Snobby seaman bastard. :wink:

See? Chair Force! :smiley:

Wins the thread. Details, though? Or would you have to kill us?

Yeah, those cockroaches get so whiny! “Hey, mang, where’s my food, mang? I’m STAAAAARVEEENG here, mang!”

45

I am scared of flying but do it anyway, and any type of turbulence stresses me out.

The SO and I were in Peru and were going to fly the Nazca Lines. We booked a trip with a Dutch couple we met along the way. It was a little 5 seater Cessna. The flight is uneventful - except for spinning right, then left, over every line - and we’re on the way back. The pilot motions with his hand like he’s landing and we assume he’s telling us to prepare for landing.

Nope. Rollers. UUUUUUUPPPPPPPPPP, DDDDOOOOOWWWWWWNNNNNN, level out. Holy sh*t! I was out of my seat, OMG, what the hell? UUUUUUUUPPPPPPPP, DDDOOOOWWWWWWWNNNNNN, level out. Christ! WTF? He did it two more times before the Dutch guy asked him to stop or he’d puke.

I seriously thought I was going to pass out from fear. I will never forget that feeling.

46

Grand Canyon Airways. They fly the scenic flights up and down the canyon in nice little planes with big windows for folks to take pictures through. We hit turbulence as soon as we went over the edge of the canyon and about three minutes later, I threw up everything but my toenails. And I spent the rest of the flight trying to throw them up.

Second worst? Honolulu to Tokyo on JAL. Nice, smooth flight, great food, great service. I’m on the aisle seat, a 13-14 year old girl in the middle seat, her mom on the window. Halfway through the flight, the girl goes to sleep and starts to fart in her sleep. I don’t know what mom fed that child, but the vapors were peeling the paint off the bulkhead. I was trying to figure out how to make the oxygen masks fall down. I started shifting in my seat to wake her up, and every time she started to doze off again, I’d shift to keep her awake.

47

Oh yeah. I made this mistake once, flying with a headcold. The landing was an adventure in pain, I could not get my ears to pop. Took about 3 days for my hearing to get back to normal.

48

Nothing as horrible as most of the others on here…
My worst flight was on a business trip from Dallas back to Phoenix back in ‘98. After racing like hell to barely get to the terminal in time, a sudden thunderstorm opened up over DFW and closed the airport for 2 hours. So then after we finally boarded, we sat in the queue on the tarmac for 3 agonizing hours while the tremendous backlog of flights cleared out. Shortly after getting into the air, the pilot announced an unexpected stop in El Paso. Turns out there was a drunk unruly passenger in first class that they wanted off the flight pronto. Then we sat on the ground in ELP for over an hour waiting for takeoff clearance because the plane was overweight. Finally on the way home, the flight attendants announced there would be no drink service to the ¾ of the passengers that never got it the first time because all the ice had melted. And oh yeah –the lavatories are closed too. Their words “you don’t wanna know why”. I haven’t flown American since then.

A few years ago, I flew a 34 seat turboprop into Evansville, IN. Except for being crammed full and bumpy, the flight was pretty uneventful. Near the end of the flight, the flight attendant was making her way to the back row where I was seated, collecting trash along the way. Once she got to our row, she had quite a large bag. She looked at me, thrust the bag out and asked me to stuff it under my seat. While I was chuckling under my breath, the guy next to me turned to me and mockingly said “in case of emergency, the trash bag under your seat can be used as a flotation device”

49

God, yes. Whole new world of pain.

On that note - when my husband was a kid, he was flying with one of his then-teenaged sisters (who had a cold), and their mother. On the descent, his sister - who was a bit of a drama queen at the time - begins to scream in pain. Literally, screaming. I gather the flight attendants investigated, learned it wasn’t a real emergency or anything and also couldn’t get her to shut up, and just waited for the plane to land. I feel sorry for anyone who had to hear that. (Well, for her pain too, but sheesh, by the time you’re a teenager you should be able to hold in most of that.)

50

Not so much horrible as bizarre: Flying home last month on an MD-80, our pilot got lost. On the runway. In Omaha. If you’ve ever flown through Eppley Field, you know what a trick this is.

Something seemed a little off on approach; I suspect that the winds were from an unusual direction and we came down on a runway I’m not used to. Then we turned away from the terminal. Eventually, we stopped for quite a while, before the pilot came on and said we had been asked to wait for some other ground traffic to clear. Half an hour later, he came back on, and confessed that we had been mis-directed to a taxiway that wasn’t rated for our plane, but we couldn’t turn around. So we waited for a tow. As the tow took us home, I looked out the window, and we were right outside the Silverhawk Charter terminal. Somehow, our pilot had ended up heading to the General Aviation terminal on the far side of the airfield. Man, was he sheepish as we deplaned. In retrospect, I’m impressed he got out of the cockpit to face us as we left; I would have found something that needed doing up front.

51

Nothing major here.

Was flying to and from Thailand a bit around '99 - 2000. This was when Qantas started to slip from being a famously fantastic airline to “passably ok” through various forms of cost-cutting (British Airways - almost the same company in some ways - did the same). This was about the same time that a Qantas bird skidded of a slick BKK runway because the company was trying to save a few bucks on fuel by asking pilots not to use reverse thrust.

Get on a Qantas (or might have been a code-shared BA - I forget) plane at Bangkok, and we are told by the pilot that we’d have an hour’s wait before take-off. He explained that this was because there was a curfew on landing from the north before 6am in Sydney, and although we were supposed to land from the south, it had become north due to a predicted southerly wind, so we’d wait in Bangkok until we could land in Sydney after 6am. Actually I remember now - it was a British pilot, and I felt like banging on the cockpit door and telling him that every good Sydney boy knows there are never southerlies at that time of morning and he’d most likely be landing into a nor’easter, so take the fuck off already.

The captain then told us that (back to the airline’s penny pinching) he was not able to use the air conditioning in the cabin, and apologised for the heat, which was tropical and oppressive. To his credit, about half an hour later, he must have thought “to hell with company policy”, and he started the engines - we got some cool air.

The next morning, we landed in Sydney - from the curfew-free south over the water - and into a nor-easter. Grrr.

52

I feel so fortunate. I’ve never had anything happen that even remotely approached half of this stuff. Of course, I’m also fond of airplanes, so stuff that other people might consider awful doesn’t faze me. I was booked for a Phoenix-Chicago-Albany flight once, and while on the ground in Chicago there was a ‘change of equipment’ announcement, which usually means ‘broken plane’. My ticketed flight was on something like an A320 or a 737, and it was full, but most of the passengers were continuing on to somewhere in Canada after the Albany touchdown; there were a couple dozen of us who were stopping in New York, so rather than make us wait for the same mid-range jet as the international passengers, they put us on a Canadair regional jet about the size of a Greyhound bus. We took off in the pouring rain. I thought it was pretty cool, myself, since they had us wait for larger traffic in a cul-de-sac on the taxiway, where I could watch the Boeings and McDonnell-Douglases wander past, but a lot of my fellow passengers turned white from the moment they led us down onto the tarmac to board, and didn’t return to their normal color until we landed again.

My worst flight experience was pretty tame in comparison. I was 12, my sister was 10, and we were flying cross-country to visit family. I was prone to getting carsick at that age and my sister wasn’t, so they gave me the aisle seat and gave her the window. We learned two things on that trip: One is that I don’t get airsick, even in turbulence, and two is that my sister is terrified of flying. About halfway from Minneapolis to Boston I started hoping that my sister would hyperventilate long enough to pass out and make things easier on the both of us. I’m still a very laid-back flyer, but the last time my sister had to fly somewhere (funeral; she couldn’t not go) she wound up going to a doctor while she was there and getting a bottle of Xanax for the ride home.

On the bright side, I got the window seat for the entire return trip. It’s pretty awesome to watch the wings flex.

53

I got a few but this got me to remembering. I have been flying since I was still in my Mom’s womb. All little private airplanes. Then some piston stuff. (I love big round engines with propellers.) Anyway, first time in a 727 back when they were new. I was sitting fwd where I could not see the wings on takeoff. The plane was not full and I moved back to a window seat and for some reason the pilot went from cruise to ‘let it all hang out’ all in one go. I about flipped out. I thought the wing was coming apart. I could not believe what I was seeing. I thought it was a malfunction. Scary thing for a kid to see who was used to regular Cessna flaps.

54

Some people at a remote northern Ontario reserve (fly-in access only, other than an ice road) liked to occasionally shoot at planes as they landed and took off – particularly the planes that brought the travelling court to town.

At one point I suggested to the judge that since we had a judge, prosecutor, defence attorney, and court reporter, if the police were able to catch the shooters, we should not delay the flight, and instead have a trial in the air – and then toss the shooters out.

Seeing a bullet hole appear in the wing beside you is infuriating.

55

As I was flying out of Bangkok just three months ago, the pilot made an emergency stop about a second before the point of no return. Wheelbrakes, airbrakes, reverse thrust, etc. An engine had failed. My thought was, calmly, “so this is what it feels like to die”. My insides were going 19 to the dozen, though, and my adrenalin was flowing like a waterfall. Normally when something like that happens, I look to the stewardesses to gauge their reaction. The stewardess I looked to was screaming her head off. Not good.

On the flipside, someone I know worked for a certain well-known Irish businessman, and they were on a Lear jet from LA back to Ireland, having signed a big business deal. The businessman had phoned from the limo and asked the crew to get some beer in for them to celebrate. After they took off, they opened the fridge and found that the crew had only got six beers in, for three of them.

The horror.

C’mon, crew - they were Irish. The exec went into the cockpit to explain the dreadful situation, and demanded that the pilot call ahead to a the nearest airfield to get “a decent amount of beer” ready, and put down to pick it up. Since the boss-man was the boss-man and it was a chartered aircraft, the pilot agreed, so they stopped off in Buttfuck Nevada to pick up a few crates that were waiting for them, and were able to get properly stocious.

Ah, the dotcom boom, what a laugh.

56

On the way back from Japan two summers ago after breaking up with my then-GF, I decided to get moderately sloshed on the return flight to San Fran → Boston. Unfortunately I did not know that alcohol tolerance is affected by flying. Seeing as I was passed out for 13 of the 16 hour flight, I had a very uneventful trip. I wish I could say the same for the middle-aged Japanese couple in front of me that I puked all over… :frowning:

57

My worst is more of a non-flight story. I was scheduled to fly in a puddle-jumper from Morgantown to Pittsburgh, normally a 20-minute flight. Unfortunately for me and the other eight passengers, the airport was completely fogged in, and the flight was cancelled. In order for us to make our connections, the airline decided to drive us. They packed the nine of us, plus the driver and our luggage, in a 7-seat minivan. I felt fortunate I wasn’t one of the two people crouching in the van’s luggage area for the hour and a half drive.

58
  1. I left a conference in early January for flight back home. Got on the subway down Conn. Ave. as the snow started to fall. By time I got to Washington National it was about 4 inches deep. Boarded the plane and waited for it to be de-iced. Taxied out to the queue. Waited. Taxied back to the terminal to be de-iced. Waited. More de-icing. Back to the queue. Still snowing. Took off. Made it. The next week Air Florida did not. Og bless Lenny Skutnik et al. Haven’t flown since.
59

Two really memorable (in a bad way) flights.

In the early '80s I flew from the Middle East to Hong Kong, the old airport. I never really got the geography straight but the landing pattern seemed to go right through down town HK and the runway stuck out into the water. The pilot was evidently new at landing in HK. We swooped down on the runway and just before we could see it, he aborted and went round again. And again. And again. He finally landed (VERY hard) on the 4th try. The first abort didn’t bother anyone but by the 3rd, the entire plane was dead quiet.

The other thing was my own fault. I had a round-the-world ticket on SQ and my first stop was Bangkok. I overstayed my time, missed my flight, and generally screwed things up. We flew to Hong Kong and I sat in the airport for 6 hours. Then we flew to Honolulu (12 to 14 hours IIRC) where the plane broke. The passengers were stuffed into a departure lounge and kept there for 12 hours. They wouldn’t let us leave because we didn’t have our luggage and they wouldn’t give us our luggage because the plane was going to be fixed “shortly.” In the end there was a passenger revolt, a sort of drunken, stumbling mob demanding to be let out. They arranged other flights and I then flew to San Francisco, from there to LA, from there to Nashville, and then drove 2.5 hours to get home. By the time I got to my parents’ house, my jet lag was a fearsome thing and my body believed it was the week before last Tuesday.

Regards

Testy

60

Last spring, my girlfriend and I were flying out to see some friends in Boston. The flight was Northwest with a connection in Detroit. On the way home, we barely make it to our connecting, but get on OK. After inexplicably waiting on the tarmac for a couple of hours until about 10pm, the crew eventually announce that the plane is non-functional and that there would be no contingency plan, as the crew are on overtime. We get a voucher for a lousy hotel (which we get to at about 1am), and naturally, they somehow aren’t able to give us our luggage, which is where our change of clothes and toiletries are.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. Again we’re flying Northwest with a connection in Detroit. On the way home, guess what? This time, we actually take off from Detroit and spend about half an hour in the air when the pilot informs us that the plane is having ‘computer troubles’ and they have to turn around. The plane is making some odd adjustments as we land - instead of the lateral tail adjustments, they’re tipping the wings to turn. We land and then stop on the middle of the runway. Then the pilots fess up - the steering had gone out and the co-pilot decided to wing it. Sorry. :o There was some nervous applause. We had to wait until they could send a tug out to pull us back to the terminal. Luckily, the airline had taken the hour or so to rustle up a replacement plane and crew to get us out of there.

But that’s not the end of it. The icing on the cake was when the crew needed two passes at the runway at our final destination. There wasn’t even any weather or wind!

Three cheers for de-regulation!