Unforgettable Airline Travel Horror Stories

While it is the fastest way to travel from point A to point B, we unfortunately can’t choose who we board our flights with. Your seat neighbor may be a crying infant or an irate gentleman set on spreading his misery.

Fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the flight as your read through these airplane nightmares from the accounts of fliers and flight attendants alike.

The Cross-Country Flight

I have pretty bad hearing issues and wear hearing aids. Normally when I fly, I leave them in for the safety check, then pull them and promptly check out. I was on my way back from work-related travel and had the cheapest most awful seat on the plane. About 30 minutes into the flight, this 20-year-old guy starts having an EPIC meltdown.

Apparently, the Wi-Fi on the plane is too slow for him and he starts pounding and banging the seat in front of him. He then hits my tray with his knee, knocking my hearing aids up and away. I try to get up to catch them and he hits me right in the face. I’m a 5’3″

tall, 100 lb girl, and this guy is like six feet tall and pretty big. He sent me hard to the floor.

I was told that after that, someone restrained him, the plane turned back around, and he was escorted off the plane. The attendants were super nice, and the other passengers helped me find my hearing aids.

I still don’t know what happened entirely, but they let me lay down across two first-class seats with an ice pack over my face for most of the cross-country flight.

Story credit: Reddit / Turinggirl

Taking Matters Into My Own Hands

I was a kid flying out to Utah to start my teen tour. About halfway through the flight, the captain got on the speaker to announce an engine had failed and we needed to make an emergency landing in Chicago. Needless to say, we got a little concerned. But one angry passenger took matters into her own hands. She stormed up to the flight attendant and let loose.

She explained she was a nanny and needed to get to Utah to attend to the children she took care of. I’m not exactly sure what she was hoping—that the pilot, upon hearing that a babysitter was on board would risk the lives of everyone to fly us all through, or that the flight attendant would be so moved by this story that she would climb out on the wing and repair the engine mid-flight.

Alas, there was no emergency jet pack to give this passenger to blast away from the plane to get to Utah on time, and she was told to sit down.

Story credit: Reddit / Imalawyerkid

Rubber Gloves Required

I was waiting on a flight in Denver. A little old man gets on and is arguing with the flight attendants about how he’s in “business class” and he paid for “business class”.

This is a two-class flight, first and coach, the flight attendant tries to explain to him, but he’s having none of it. I figure he was probably connecting to an international flight that had three classes at the next airport but whatever.

He decides he’s going to sit in first class anyway. So he gets into the last row in first class, squeezes all the way over to the window seat, and refuses to budge. After a lot of arguing with the flight attendants, the authorities get called in.

Meanwhile, the HUGE man (probably 6’8’’ tall) whose seat he was sitting on had arrived and was just laughing at the whole situation.

The best part was when the officers arrived and the huge man had to tell them, “Hey, it’s not me”. The officers spend probably 20-30 minutes trying to talk the poor old guy into moving to his proper seat, but he’s not budging and becoming more and more incoherent.

So finally the officers have got to do something: they put on their rubber gloves, grab the guy, drag him out of the seat, and put him on the floor to cuff him.

The old guy is screaming and crying like someone’s hurting him. Finally, they get him off the plane. The officers came back in to get everyone’s contact info in case they needed them for a trial.

The poor flight attendants had to clean the seats because the old guy had soiled himself when they were pulling him out of the seat.

Story credit; Reddit / bulldogdiver

Praying For Peace

I was flying back to the States from Japan. The flight in itself was already a really long one. My family and I were seated at the very back of the plane like we couldn’t get any more back than that as far as seats went.

Anyways, halfway through the 9-10-hour flight, a couple of rows ahead of us, we just hear this poor woman frantically screaming in another language, I believe it was Mandarin or something along those lines.

I looked up and saw her constantly screaming something, it must have been a name or a cry for help. I believe it was her husband; he was unconscious and wasn’t responding. The flight attendants came by, and they even managed to find a doctor who was on the plane.

They dragged his body toward the back of the plane and found he didn’t even have a pulse and were applying CPR to him literally right next to my sister, who was sitting on the other side right of me.

They constantly tried but nothing worked. The cause was heart failure, and according to the people with the gentleman, he had many health issues. After they stopped, the flight attendants asked my family and me if we could move seats.

They had to wrap the body up in blankets and move him somewhere until we landed. They planned on putting him in one of the bathrooms and sealing it off for the remainder of the flight, but their regulations didn’t seem to allow that.

So instead, we moved and took the seats of the family of the deceased. They ended up buckling him into my seat, and I ended up sitting where he sat.

For the remainder of the flight, there I was sitting in the seat of a man who had just passed, while his body was buckled into the seat I was previously in. It was a really strange feeling, and it wasn’t comforting at all.

Because of our positioning, turning the plane around wouldn’t have mattered. We were hours from any land that could offer medical help. It’s frightening to be in a situation where no real help will come. I hope the family found some peace.

Story credit: Reddit