This Is The Most Unbelievable Behavior You’ve Seen While Flying

Flying is a huge headache, but occasionally the cost of your ticket comes with free entertainment. An airport is like a jar and the humans inside, a bunch of angry bees. Transportation Security Administration and airport bars are there just to shake up the jar. Eventually the released bees end up lingering around gates in the terminal and causing chaos. But you can you really blame them?  

Flying might become quite the luxury soon, which is why I asked you about the most unbelievable behavior you’ve ever seen on a flight now, before we’re all banished to buses, multi-day road trips, or just staying home. And man, there were just too many good answers. I love a Question of the Day I can’t tear myself away from. I put together my top ten here, but really they’re all good. Take a look through the bananas experiences of your fellow Jalops and keep those skies as friendly as possible. 

More amusing than annoying, but one time when my daughter and I were waiting to board a red-eye flight, we saw a woman rolling up and down the terminal walkway on roller skates. I found it amusing that she must have brought her skates in her carry-on. Nobody complained and it was late so the terminal didn’t have many people around. Roller skate woman ended up being on our flight. I just remember the sight of her blissfully rolling up and down the terminal with her headphones on. Just a bit of whimsy and free spiritedness.

From Tyler “T__H”

My favorite personal flight experience happened back in 2018 (pre-COVID as this will become important).

I was on a flight from Atlanta to San Francisco, main cabin, window seat. A couple sat down in the center and aisle seat and soon the wife, in the aisle seat, began to fidget. After some back and forth between the two, the husband turned to me and asked “excuse me, do you have a cat?” to which I replied “well, not on me!”.

After many histrionics, “will you be ok?” “what should we do?”, etc. the wife pressed the flight attendant call button (mind you, we were somewhere around row 15-18 and we were still boarding the majority of the aircraft). When the flight attendant arrived, the two were VERY put out that the attendant didn’t have a face-mask available for her (somewhat ironic now). After more wringing of hands, the two finally asked if they might be re-seated… possibly in first class?

So there, the penny dropped. My first thought was ‘ok, if anyone is moving to first class, it will be easier to move solo-traveler me than the two of you!’ However, the flight attendant confidently said she would see what was available and quickly swapped them to row 37, the last row of the aircraft! My two new seatmates came forward and asked “are you really traveling with a cat?!?!?”

From keith

I was on flight from London to Johannesberg years ago. I overheard a passenger, sitting in the set of seats to my right, announce to a flight attendant he was taking an Ambien to help him sleep. Well, it worked, but maybe not in the way he expected. About two hours into the flight, after meals had been served and lights were out, he started sleep walking around the cabin. Every few passengers he would stop and have a conversation with them. Thing was, most of those people were asleep. The flight attendants didn’t want to wake him but were eventually able to guide him back to his seat where he stayed the rest of the flight. Some of the conversations he thought he was having were quite animated! He was laughing one minute and arguing the next. It was all quite odd.

From uphillputt

I’ve traveled over 600k miles in my career and surprisingly I’ve not come across too many total buffoons. Plenty of drunk guys being jerks, but the most unbelieveable might have been on a flight from Zurich to Lisbon. Someone suffered a medical emergency en route and while it didn’t require us to be diverted, it did mean that when we landed we all had to stay seated to allow medical personnel to get to the passenger ASAP.

They made the announcement 3 times but there were still a few passengers who jumped up to get their bags and get off the plane. The flight attendants made them sit back down, and one woman (an American or Canadian based on her voice) made a massive fuss about it. Loudly proclaiming all sorts of things…basically amounting to how important her time was.

They wheeled the poor patient off the plane looking really ill, and she huffed incredibly loudly as they passed by. I’ve never wanted to punch someone so badly.

From SantaCruzin

A bit of a twist. Flying Southwest and got the old club (lounge) seating row. If you remember these, you would generally be at an awkward distance from the person facing you. Unless you both were remarkably short, odds were good that you would pretty much have your legs intertwined the whole flight. Last minute, a passenger boards and sits in the seat facing me. Looks slightly familiar to me. She introduces herself, says something to the effect of “looks like I’ll be riding in your lap this flight”.

I finally figured it out later. Soap opera actress, emmy nominee… she’d probably been in around 2000 episodes at that point, and family members even had watched that show. And I drew a complete blank.

Unbelievable. 🙂

From Shortyoh

Well, unbelievable could also be shocking and this was at the top of my shocking list!

Years ago, during my heavy travel, Foreign Service days, I’m flying on KLM from Abidjan to Amsterdam with a stop in Kano, Nigeria, a major hangout of large terrorist organizations.

Because of the length of the flight, we were eligible to get bumped up to business class, so I’m in the front of the plane, and one of the few white faces up there (and that comes into play soon.) Leaving Abidjan was no problem and we land for our pickup only in Kano. When we land in Kano, we quickly notice that the pilot is not going to the gates. Instead, he’s taking us to a concrete pad at the edge. And then we see what I was able to ID as possible militia surround the jet. The pilot tells everyone (in multiple languages) that there are going to be troops boarding the jet and stay calm and still. At this point, I’m really focused on the book I’m reading because I want to make no eye contact with anyone. They board the jet and I get a quick, blurry glance at some pictures the troops are looking at and it’s for a white male. And I’m one of only a few white males up front…and I’m travelling under my diplomatic passport on official business. They come up to me, look at the picture and move on to the row behind me. They want the guy behind me. What he does is fight back until he gets clubbed down and drug off of the jet. When that was done, we never went to the gates. We just took off for Amsterdam.

From Xavier96

A guy so heavily medicated / drunk that within minutes of normally boarding an international flight he became so unresponsive that he was unable to be awoken to buckle his seatbelt. Caused a two hour delay to wake him up, get him and his checked bags off the plane plus refuel the jet because we idled for so long. He also completely lost a shoe in the process and it was never found.

From Cyril Figgis

A few years ago, we were in an Admiral’s Club and a woman gave herself a pedicure. Removed the polish with little acetone pads, trimmed her toenails, used a foot scraper on her callouses, then base coat, 2 color coats and a top coat. A full 45 minutes.

The attendant walked by a couple of times but said nothing. As soon as she left the cleaning crew arrived with the full complement of supplies.

From OuttaHere

I was returning to Toronto several years ago and about an hour after the flight started, the landing gear deployed. That’s definitely weird… but then a little while later the really weird part was when the Captain delivered a message that there’s a heat warning on the landing gear, and we’ll be landing under emergency conditions. He was pretty clear that a fire was possible, and fire equipment will meet the plane on the runway and there was a good chance we would get to use the emergency slides to exit the plane really quickly.

The flight staff was amazing. Super transparent. Kinda scarily transparent. The “we could all die in a large explosive fireball” was pretty clear.

Hollywood might have you believe that people on the plane would be upset. Crying. Screaming maybe.

The unbelievable thing? The plane was silent. All noise people were making before the announcement stopped. Just silence. It was surreal.

From dolsh