People Don’t Even Know How They Survived These 57 Awful Flights

I was on a nighttime flight 15 years ago. All of a sudden, the cabin lights are turned on to full blast and the captain makes an announcement.

"You may be smelling a noxious odor. We have an electrical fire on board, and can't be sure how quickly it might spread. We are being diverted to the nearest airport and will be executing an emergency landing in 15 minutes. Please give your attention to your flight attendants as they instruct you in proper crash landing procedure."

I would have thought there would be hysteria, but everyone became quiet. I had my 11 month old with me and was advised to hold him in my arms and assume the crash landing procedure as best as possible to shield his body with mine. Everyone on that plane thought we were goners. I was talking quietly to my baby, pointing out the window at the earth below and telling him how beautiful it all was.

After about 10 minutes and no catastrophic failure, we all began to relax a bit, thinking that the fire was contained or spreading extremely slowly. We all positioned ourselves for a crash landing - the tarmac was ablaze with the flashing lights of fire trucks, ambulances, & police vehicles, all in preparation for a worst case scenario.

We landed smoothly & without incident, thank God. That was a really, really bad 15 minutes.

We were flying on a night flight from Germany to New York, and the flight couldn’t have gone any better.

We were descending into JFK (night time) and the back wheels touch ground, then the nose and everyone started clapping, then 2.2 seconds you just hear the engines go full throttle and we took right off.

You can see the terror and panic in peoples faces. I was with my cousin who suffers from panic attacks as is, so this triggered it instantly.

The flight attendants didn’t seem to have any idea either. I immediately thought it was being hijacked.

We flew around in circles for 10 minutes before the pilot came on the PA and pretty much said

“Our apologies about that, we were landing on a take off runway”

I think about what could have happened very often as I fly pretty frequently.

Japan Airlines, 8hr flight to Australia. Probably the best and also worst flight I had been on. Best as in there were literally only 20 passengers including myself, a fully staffed crew and the catering was stocked. We got to sit anywhere we wanted and they allowed us to stretch out over 3 seats and sleep. The sake and food was flowing because they had enough for a full flight. Sounds like heaven right?

Wrong. 50 minutes in a strange older couple comes and sit in the seats behind me. They had the whole plane to themselves but decided to sit there and be loud AF. I put my earphones on and ignore them. A few mins later they come and sit right next to me and begin to talk to me about how awesome it is having the plane so empty, and if I like new things because they only liked new and exciting things. This went on for about 30 mins.

At this point I’m trying to be polite, and tell them I’m going to move to another seat to read my book. I moved as far away as I could, asked for some more sake and sat down. Wouldn’t you know it, 10 mins later, there’s the old couple again and again sit right next to me. This time the crew were handing out food, so they just decided to come over and have it with me and keep talking about their incredible book they had read called The Matrix. I get a 1 and a half hour lecture on why Dragon Air is evil, and how the moon is hollow and sounds like a bell when you ring it. I try to eat my food in peace while they go on about new and exciting things.

After a couple of times moving to a different
seat, and them not getting the hint I just wanted to be left alone, I gave up and I told them I was going to watch a movie. The guy kept interrupting me every chance he got, and to top it all off, his wife was doing this weird chicken dance in front of me every 30 mins to avoid getting DVT. I will never forget it and it will haunt me for the rest of my life

Last hour of the flight they fell asleep and I legged it to a seat right at the back in a random place and finally had peace. Empty plane ride was already ruined, so I just ordered more sake and made the most of it.

This was when I was 10-11 years old. Went on a 9 hour flight and had the middle seat. An older woman sat in the window seat and had a horrendous smelling perfume on. The kind that gives you a headache in the first 10 min. She went to the restroom and re-applied her perfume every couple of hours. The smell plus turbulence was enough for me to throw up for the duration of the flight. For years after I was so scarred that I took motion sickness pills every flight. Only to realize I didn’t have motion sickness, it was just that old woman’s horrible perfume.

I unknowingly had a sinus infection when flying from Greece to Italy. Thought I just felt terrible from a hangover. About 20 minutes into the flight my eardrum starts bursting and leaking fluid. It was some of the worst pain I’ve ever felt. The pressure subsided a bit once we landed in Rome but I had almost 100% hearing loss in that ear until the swelling went down 4 days later. I chug Sudafed like crazy now if I feel any sort of congestion prior to flying.

I've been on some long and irritating flights, especially while making frequent trips between Europe and America.

To this day, though, one story always springs to mind when I think about harrowing experiences on airplanes.

------

Back when I was about eight years old, my family took a trip somewhere or other. Due to an issue with our tickets, though, we wound up being seated in seemingly random spots throughout the airplane, and none of us were next to each other. This would have been fine if it hadn't been for the fact that my neighbor turned out to be a young woman who seemed to be hell-bent on undermining virtually every rule that I'd ever been taught.

Within moments of my arrival next to the girl, she'd done her best to engage me in conversation. Since I knew that I wasn't supposed to speak to strangers, her friendly small-talk made me very uncomfortable... not because I was actually wary of dialogue with her, but because I was worried that my parents might walk by and catch me.

The young woman's next transgression was taking out *and turning on* her Walkman while the airplane was in the process of taking off. (For those of you who may not recall, a Walkman was like an iPod, except that it could only hold about two dozen songs... and it had a tendency to transform said songs into spaghetti.) I can remember scrambling to grab the safety pamphlet from the seat in front of me, then frantically pointing at the section that warned against electronic devices being active during takeoff. The would-be saboteur just smiled reassuringly and kept right on with her forbidden activity, causing me to anxiously grip my armrest.

If that had been the end of things, I might have escaped without the psychological scarring that I still carry... but unfortunately, my aggressor was far from finished. About midway through the flight, she dug through her purse and pulled out a small, colorful package, which she opened with a nonchalant smile.

"Hey," she said to me, "would you like a cherry cough drop?"

Alarm bells rang in my mind like they never had before. My mother had always told me that *any stranger* who offered me *medicine* was gearing up to do some *very nasty* things to me. She had never specified what those nasty things *were*, but I knew that they had to be truly abhorrent. Maybe, though, *just maybe*, the girl didn't realize that cough drops *were* medicine, and was simply one of those people who ate them for their flavor. I'd heard legends of folks like that, and if it happened that my seat-mate was one of them, maybe this was an opportunity for education.

"Oh, no, no thank you," I replied. "I'm not sick or anything."

"Okay!" the girl said brightly.

"... Are *you* sick?" I asked, hoping to prod the conversation forward. (In the face of this new potential threat, I'd all but forgotten about not talking to strangers.)

The young woman shook her head. "Nope!"

I felt the panic in my chest start to subside. "Then why are you eating cough drops? They're *medicine*, you know."

"Oh, I know!" the girl said with a laugh. "But they taste wonderful, and they help me relax."

The klaxons in my head started blaring with renewed vigor. Not only was this stranger talking to me, but she was *also* one of those people who ate medicine for fun... and she was *trying to offer me some!* I'd been warned about all three of those things, but never in my life had I expected to be faced with such a titanic trifecta of terror.

I spent the rest of the flight in complete silence, all the while ready to scream if the petite seventeen-year-old next to me showed any signs of attempting a kidnapping.

On a flight from Wausau, WI to Chicago, I was on a small regional jet. I was talking to my coworker in the seat across the aisle as we approached Chicago. One moment I’m looking face-to-face with him, then suddenly I was looking down at him. Right after that, I was looking up at him. We finally settled back into a normal cruising pattern, but it was a scary “WTH just happened?” moment. I don’t think we came close to rolling over, but it sure as hell felt that way.

When we arrived at O’Hare (where I considered kissing the tarmac), a fellow passenger suggested that we’d somehow been caught in the wake of a larger jet. Sounded plausible but not terribly reassuring.

The best moment occurred after the pilot brought the plane back under control. The cabin was silent, and the captain opened his microphone, cleared his throat, and said, “Sorry.” He was a man of few words, I guess.

About 6 years ago I was sitting on the plane and I suddenly felt a tickle in my throat. It just wouldn’t go away, I’d cough and cough and cough, nothing. The only thing that helped was ice chips, but even then I couldn’t stop it was miserable.

That night I woke up in the middle of the night with two swollen eyes, swollen lips, hives all over my body, hot joints, and a tight chest. I was having some severe allergic reaction to something. Which means that on the plane… my throat was closing and I just didn’t know it. Of course the ice chips helped because they were keeping the swelling down.

What’s weird is that has never happened before or since then and I’m not allergic to anything that I know of.

12+ hour flight. Middle aisle on a 747. The seat recliner was broken, the guy next to me took his shoes off and his feet stank, the woman to my left spilled orange juice on me, and the headphone plug for the in-flight entertainment was broken.

I did get extra potato chips as a compensation for the seat problem, though.

On a flight from Philadelphia to Denver, late December 1990.
As we get about an hour from Denver, pilot tells us a blizzard has closed the Denver airport, and we need to divert. We divert to a place called Gunnison Co.
Gunnison airport is small, not really set up for large commercial airliners. As we approach , i look out the window and see mountain tops on either side. The captain comes on a tells us to prepare for an emergency landing. Meaning stow your stuff, buckle your seatbelt, and assume the crash position….as in put your head between your legs. Now i’m about 14 years old, traveling with my Aunt, 2 cousins and their two friends. My cousin Billy and I are joking about this situation , while my Aunt is praying with my other cousin.
We land, and need basically every foot of the runway to come to a stop. The pilot then has to get off the plane and make a phone call because we are basically alone ,hours from Denver. They get some shuttle buses to show up after about an hour, then we begin the 6 HOUR ride to Denver. That was a long day.

Circling Atlanta because it was covered in a severe thunderstorm. We went round and round for over an hour, this was after a 4 hour flight from Phoenix. Pilot comes over the speaker with "folks we're out of fuel so we're landing now". We started the descent and it went pitch black. It was silent in the cabin. You could hear alarms in the cockpit and the engines over revving like they were going to explode. It was terrifying. We would suddenly drop every few seconds, just straight down, and a startled gasp would echo throughout the passengers but they still stayed quiet. The pilot came back on and said we were about to touch down and to brace for possible impact. When we landed it felt like we just dropped 30 feet down instead of gliding down to the runway. You could hear the tires screaming on the wet pavement. Finally we came to a complete stop and just sat there for what felt like an eternity. Then we slowly started taxing around to the terminal. The pilots came out and greeted people as they got off the plane. A couple of women hugged them. Most men shook their hands, I certainly did. When I shook their hands I could see that they were soaking wet from sweat. I think that's what affected me most, this wasn't routine for them and they were probably just as scared as the rest of us.

At the end of my trip to Canada all I had was a hoodie, no clean T-shirts. I chuck everything in the hold of the plane except my iPad and headphones. So I am queuing with my boarding pass and this dude behind me makes this weird sound but I'm British (so obviously I don't turn round). Get on the plane and the air conditioning is cold, like, REAALY cold, so I pull down my sleeves, put my headphones on and pull my hood up.

Yeah. So anyhow, that dude had been sick in my hood.

wahteverr:

How did you not smell it right away?! And how rude of the guy to just not say anything to you. Wow

OP:

No, only really knew when some of it went down my neck.

I was once on an airplane sitting in first class. There was a man sitting in my row that was clipping his toenails and they were FLYING in all sorts of directions. He then proceeded to take that long metal thing on toenail clippers, clean out his toe jam, and wipe it all over his seat.

He wins the most treacherous human being award, imo.

Turbulence so bad, just before landing in LGA, that the flight attendants screamed in horror. They do this for a living.

Getting food poisoning 6 minutes before landing and experiencing the landing on the toilet.

I had a lot of ear problems as a kid that required multiple surgeries. I figured out on my first flight at age 19 that my ears could still bother me when the worst ear pain of my life hit me during the descent. Since then I figured out how to make them pop, making it less of an issue. But I was unprepared that first time and spent quite a bit of time holding back tears until my ears popped on their own a few minutes after landing.

Flying home to Australia. There’s some European family whose daytime is apparently our nighttime. Bored kids run endless up and down the aisles making sleep impossible. Cabin staff were useless. While in transit, a kid produces a green laser and waves it around. Unsure if it was powerful enough to blind, but idiot parents don’t tell him off. Thankfully their connecting flight was not the same. Slept for maybe 2 hours before arriving to attend my mother’s funeral.

A few come to mind:

-On a 13-hour flight, my neighbors were a very old chinese man and his wife who declined to eat any of the airline's food, instead eating some kind of fermented mushrooms they'd brought in a jar with them. The mushrooms stank horribly, and each time they opened the jar it immediately woke everyone around them up and then the smell lingered in the area for a while.

-Once was in turbulence so bad that a flight attendant hit her head hard enough on the overhead bin and had to be stretchered off. The lights were flashing on and off in the cabin and multiple people around me were audibly saying prayers.

Then, last weekend actually, had a hell of an ordeal with American Airlines where they cancelled our flight, wouldn't answer phones and couldn't get a customer service rep to speak to us for over three hours, eventually offered us a flight (at no additional charge!) that took off three days later and would've cut our whole vacation in half (which we declined), eventually got us a taxi to an airport an hour away for a different flight while accidentally cancelling our return flight so we basically had to do the whole ordeal over again on the way back.

6 hour flight to the west coast. Plane was very hot inside, had two small kids behind me screaming and kicking the whole time.

The row was 3 Seats wide. My row was three sweaty fat people (myself included). I had the window seat. Behind us was the mother on the aisle seat with a toddler in her lap. The toddler would screech every couple minutes and would run up and down the aisle. The two older kids behind me spent most of the flight climbing on my seat and playing in the floor hitting my seat. Their names were suuuper basic names like Jayden and Brayden. I learned through the nonstop arguing and screeching fights.

The mom did nothing the entire flight, even with requests by the staff. She only said "this is why daddy doesn't want us to visit.".

Had Subway for lunch, food poisoning kicked in just as we were about to take off. Flight was from Christchurch, New Zealand to Dubai (+10 hour flight) Threw up for the whole duration of the flight.

I sincerely apologise to the two kind french ladies who had to tolerate me spewing vomit for the whole flight. Hope you’re doing well out there!

Oh, and the 2 day layover in Dubai was absolute hell.