Hey Pandas, What's The Weirdest Thing That's Happened To You On A Flight?

This was about twenty years ago. My 7-ish year old son and I were traveling from Tampa to Detroit for a wedding. The plane was moderately full. Mid-flight we were both napping, when I smelled smoke. A flight attendant was moving quickly down the aisle. Half-awake, I asked her if she smelled that. (duh, I know.) Turns out one of the people in the seat directly in front of me was smoking in the lavatory.
They were escorted back, arguing that they didn't know they weren't allowed to do that. (Yeah right.) After several minutes of listening to them being lectured at, the captain came on the intercom to remind passengers that smoking was not allowed anywhere on the plane.
Things finally settled down and just as I was starting to fall asleep again, I smelled smoke. Again. Crew converged on the lavatory again. This time it was someone from the seat right behind me who had done the same thing!
When that person was escorted back, they were complaining in Spanish that they didn't know and didn't understand the announcements at the beginning of the flight, after the first incident, all the no-smoking signs, etc. They got lectured in two languages by the crew. Cue yet another announcement about not smoking, including listing the penalties for doing so.
Once we arrived at our destination, I could see that at least one person was being detained, but we were too busy meeting family to stick around and watch. As I was telling my mom the story, I suddenly realized it was Friday the 13th!
Crazy flight.
On Sunday, we had the same flight crew going home and an empty plane, so I asked about it. The head flight attendant just kinda rolled her eyes and said, "It was Friday the 13th _and_ a full moon. Something weird always happens." Since we were almost literally the only passengers some of the crew ended up playing cards with my son most of the way back. So he was left with that good memory instead of the long moment of panic from smelling smoke while stuck in a flying tin can.

When I was around 11 or 12 I was separated in seats from my family on a flight, sat next to a cool slightly older teenager who was from France and traveling alone. Occasional random chit-chat, nothing too memorable. When I was 14 I met him again - he was an exchange student who came to stay with my older sister's boyfriend at the time. We remembered each other and it was a "small world" moment. A few months later, it turned out that he was the other fatality in the car crash that took my sister (the boyfriend survived,) the day before he was set to return to France.

We're on our flight back from vacation, and there is a family sitting in the row behind my family. They were laughing, kicking, and generally being loud. It was annoying, but not a huge deal. Later in the flight, we saw all of them (Mom, Dad, and maybe 14ish year old son), taking shots that they brought on to the plane somehow. They were a bit more than just goofy...... flatout drunk for that whole 5 hour flight.

I was on a flight to Presque Isle International Airport, Maine, USA. It was a small two-engine airplane with about 8-10 passengers. As we were approaching the airport, I saw oil start coming from the left engine. It got worse and was pouring out in a steady stream as we landed. As I was getting off the plane, I told the pilot about the oil leak. Instead of looking outside the plane, he just tapped his finger on the oil gauge and said “It looks okay to me.”

IDK if this counts, but I only have flown once, and Im 99.999 sure I sat right in front of the guy from the Kiffness. (He is a guy that takes videos of animal making noises and makes music with it. His videos are great) He looked JUST like him, and someone even asked for a picture, and I overheard him talking about music to some people. My only regret is I didn't say anything because I was too scared to say hi.

More unpleasant than strange: A flight was coming in to land during a rainstorm, everything seemes normal. Then just a few moments before landing, I heard the engines hit full throttle and power up, the pilots angling up the nose. Having watched "MayDay", I knew exactly what was about to hit: a microburst, a dense pocket of air pushing down that suddenly appears. (Look up Flight 191.) The now ascending plane entered it was immediately pushed 50-100 metres straight down, like the worst vomit inducing amusement park ride, but being at full power meant the plane was well above the ground. The pilots took the plane around, and came in for a normal landing 20 minutes later. I hate flying to begin with, and now I was terrified to get on the return flight in a week.

In the 1980s was on a flight from Istanbul to Paris. One of our Engines fell off over Yugolslavia. The runway was lit up by emergency vehicles as we approached and landed. It was okay but we missed our connecting flight to the US and another plane had to be flown over from the US, so we had to stay overnight.

In the 1990s I was in Boston and was watching as a airport service truck ran into the side of our boarding airplane and did so much damage we had to wait four hours for a different flight.

I was with a group that was trying to get to Tokyo for Toy Fair. Our flight out of Boston was delayed, so we missed our connection in Chicago. The fastest way we could get there was to go east to Copenhagen, then Tokyo. Weird thing #1 was waiting for our KLM flight in the O'Hare terminal (a 10-hour layover). We noticed that the group on one side of us was engaging in Muslim prayers. And the group on the other side of us was engaging in Jewish prayers. Only in America. Once we changed planes in Copenhagen, we proceeded to fly to Tokyo -- over the northern route. I woke up a couple of hours into the flight and one of my colleagues called me over. "Look." he said, "It's a gulag. We're flying over Siberia." I looked out the window and saw a perfectly square area of light in the vast darkness of Siberia. It was a weird, yet awe-inspiring feeling. We both felt a world of emotions in that moment.

Back in the 1980s when I was in the Navy I flew up to Seattle for a long weekend from San Francisco. The flight up was okay, but the flight back had a tinge of weirdness to it.
The plane seats were so close together that this 6 foot 6 inch, long-leggity man was actually pushing the seat cushion of the seat in front with my knees, sitting as far back in my seat as I could sit. So, when the lady came along who was going to sit in the seat in front of me, I stood and asked her if she could just please not try to put her seat back because there wasn't any room, and I sat down and showed her. She gave this tight little nod and sat down. Several times during the flight I felt her try to see if the seat would go back, like she was checking to see if maybe I had my legs stretched under the seat. Finally, we landed, everybody stood up the way everybody does, and I followed the crowd out of the airplane. By the time I got into the aisle the lady was several people away from me heading out. We got out to the waiting area and she went up to a man who was waiting for her turned around and in a piercing, at the top of her voice shriek said, “That man wouldn't let me put my seat back,” pointing at me. I was in my uniform, and he gave me a nod, with a kind of beseeching, “I’ll take care of this,” look. She apparently had stewed over my simple request all the way.

One of my Moms friend once said a student from the Air Force Academy walked on board with a falcon on her arm (the school’s mascot) and asked me if the falcon could have a cup of water

The plane lost 17,000 feet of altitude in less than 2 minutes. We lived.

I was at the controls. And I was the only person in the plane. It was when I was soloing for the first time. As the wheels left the runway, my only thought was that I was now *irrevocably* committed to getting that plane back down on the ground - one way or another.

A flight of over 250 passengers... and not one sceaming baby among them.

I've only really had (mostly) uneventful flights. But my uncle told me this story a few years ago:

I was sitting at the front of economy, by the door. I picked that seat for the extra leg room, and so I can get off pretty sharpish.
About 3hours into the flight, a flight attendant sticks his head out through the curtain, looks me up and down, then disappears. A short while later he comes back, and asks if he can speak to me behind the curtain.
I unbuckled and went to see what was up. He said something along the lines of, 'I have a bit of an unusual request. A passenger has passed away in his sleep while seated in business class. Would you be willing to assist me in moving him to the back row?'
I remember asking things like, are we going to be diverted and land? and Couldn't you just leave them there?
But apparently their policy was to move them to an empty row if one was available, and the pilot had made the decision that the flight would carry on as planned.
So, yeah! On my way to Singapore, I shifted a body.

I don't know if it's true, completely fabricated, or partially true, but I did look up what happens if someone passes away on a flight and it does match some airline policies.

It's 1966, and I'm going on my first commercial air flight to go to Denver to marry my fiance. I flew out of my home airport in Georgia to change planes in Atlanta. It was an old 4 engine prop job that probably saw service in WWII! It had NO amenities and old canvas seats. Of course, there were no seatbelts or safety lectures. The only thing between the passangers and the hpilots was a short hallway with a curtain across it. So I was sitting toward the front and a family of rednecks came and sat in the next two rows back. We had barely taken off when they broke out their lunch....sandwiches, chips, pickles, dip...the whole 9 yards. It was pretty close in there, and soon, the smell made everyone queasy. We hadn't even reached cruising altitude when a strange, unearthly screaming came from a narrow, curtain-covered closet behind the captain's side where bags and coats could be stored. The curtain began to shake and flap and was suddenly ripped off the rod. There, in a smallish cage, was a chimpanzee, which looked just like J Fred Muggs from the Today Show. He was thrashing around and screaming like mad. If the cage hadn't been strapped down it would have come out of the closet and maybe the chimp would have come out of the cage! We hit rough weather and the plane was bouncing, the rednecks kept eating, the chip was thrashing around, and the kids were all crying! What a nightmare!!! When we finally landed in Atlanta they made us stay seated so they could take the chimp off first. I have no idea why it was there or where it came from. The rednecks declared they were starving after eating throughout the flight and headed out to find a snack bar. I had to run from one end of the airport to the other and barely made my flight to Denver. I never want to go through anything like that again!

On my way back from Japan to Germany the plane I was in was intercepted by two Eurofighters. That's not uncommon and usually is caused by problems with the communication equipment, but that's pretty much the out of the ordinary thing that happened.
(Those were the only two times I was on a plane)

I do humanitarian aid work. I was sitting in the front of a small Kodiak plane headed to a rural village. The warning kept coming over the speakers saying we were about to hit the mountain. We then had to buzz the runway to scare off the turkeys and get the villagers to put out the runway flags.

The one and only time I've traveled by plane, we were waiting to board, 3 1/2 hours from where we lived, and a man walked past us. My husband pops up and says, "Steve?!" It was the preacher who baptized him 30 years prior. We hadn't seen him in 15ish years. He was on the same plane we were heading to Atl. Everyone had been side eying him because he's well over 6 ft tall, 65+ years old, gray hair half way down his back, long gray beard, loud, and looks...well...homeless. The rest of the passengers were relieved when they heard him talking to my husband and realized he wasn't as strange as he appears.

I was on a flight with Egypt Air from Cairo to El Arish. I was in the emergency exit row. The door was held shut with duct tape. Once we reached altitude, cold wind and little wisps of clouds came in the through the crack. Did you ask for weird? That was the most terrifying, still trust that plane more than Boeing.

Not me but my mom and not really weird but cool. She told me that she flew on the fourth of July and got to a lot of fireworks while she was flying. She said it was like a big fireworks show.