Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Strangest experience on an Airplane?

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Flying from Cairo to Tel Aviv on El Al, I wanted to use the toilet. Of the two toilets, one had luggage barricading the entrance, the other seemed permanently 'in use'. I knocked on the door and a woman opened it to shout at me "I'm washing my hair!" Finally got a steward to move the luggage from the other toilet entrance, but the hair washing woman didn't come out until just before the plane landed. I found it very strange on an airline that has such high security that 1. they would allow unattended baggage to sit outside a toilet and 2. they would allow a passenger to wash her hair in the only other toilet!!

Rudest passenger: Transpacific flight to Asia. After the plane took off, a women came forward from her seat (in coach), and demanded that the stewardess re-seat her in a bulkhead row, exit row, or higher class, because she was tall and the seat was too small. Now, I can certainly sympathize with her plight. Absolutely. But she handled it in the most abominable way - she started screeching and yelling at the stewardess, telling her it was "ridiculous" that they can't reseat her, and that it wasn't fair, because the seat was OBVIOUSLY too small for her, and that in all her many years of flying, she'd never had a problem being reseated. If she's really had many years of flying experience, wouldn't she know in advance that the seats in coach would be uncomfortable for her? If it's that important - book business class. Or, failing that, ASK NICELY!!! After that outburst, I don't think anyone would have traded with her, either. My BEST flight experience: Flying from Paris to New York, I made my way to my seat (in coach) only to find someone in it. Sure enough, we were both assigned to that very seat. Since he didn't speak French and I did, I offered to go speak to the stewardess about it. He seemed relieved not to have to get up and said OK. I showed the duplicate boarding passes to the stewardess at the front of the plane. She motioned for a fellow stewardess to return the pass to the man in coach, and said "Follow me." I was directed to FIRST CLASS!! Heavenly, heavenly flight. When we landed in NY, I almost wanted to ask if they couldn't just circle around for a while before landing - and pass the Champagne! Another time, on a transoceanic flight, we had been delayed, waiting in the plane, for over 30 minutes for a connecting flight that had over 30 passengers that needed to be on our flight. When they finally arrived and boarded, they were all a bit cranky - apparently, they had been through several delays as well. One man was particularly grumpy, and was arguing with the stewardess, who was urging him to take his seat quickly. He said: "Lady, I've been flying for 24 hours straight, and I'm not in the mood to deal with your attitude." She quickly (and politely) replied: "Sir, I've been flying for FIFTEEN YEARS - please, take your seat."

I remembered another slightly apropos story: I was sitting in a departure lounge in San Francisco on my way to my hometown of Boise, Idaho. The seats for the departure lounge were between two departure gates, and thus shared by passengers on two separate flights (common sense, right?). They announced: "First boarding call for Flight XYZ to Boise, Idaho, boarding at the gate A", which was about 10 feet away from where I was sitting. From the seat directly behind me, very loudly, a woman says to her companion, in a very bemused voice, "BOISE, IDAHO?!? Well! *WHO* on earth would be going to BOISE, IDAHO?" (This said with equal parts amusement, disbelief, and scorn). I immediately turned to her and replied sweetly but firmly: "Well, probably HALF of the people in this boarding area!" She blushed, and murmured quietly, backpedaling, "Well . . . I suppose . . . it must be a lot of students . . . or something . . . " I, meanwhile, enjoyed a lot of thumbs-up and winks from other passengers.

The strangest thing, hmm. Well, that would have to have been on my flight to LAX from Atlanta. I arrived at the airport in plenty of time to board that morning- even had a cup of coffee before boarding. Well, we were all seated on the plane, about to taxi to the runway when all of a sudden the plane bounced! A boy sitting across the aisle made a comment about running over a cat. Several minutes later the pilot announced that one of the wheel stops for the front tire had not been removed. We had gone over it, somehow causing a bolt to be sheared off and the tire shreded. An hour later we were finally on our way- I endured an hour of sitting on the plane near an elderly couple with there 8 or 9 year old grandson- the grandmother was explaining every little detail of what was happening- which made most of the passangers surrounding her irritated. My seatmate and I joked about slipping her some of the muscle relaxers I had with me. I made to Phoenix just in time to watch my connecting flight taxi down the runway and was over an hour late meeting my husband and 2 year old daughter at LAX- they had flown in from Tulsa- another long story. Anyway, that's my strangest experience- not really strange as it is annoying.

Iberia from Madrid to Zurich. In first class. The cockpit door is open the whole flight. Nothing odd most of flight. Approach to Zurich begins and the plane drops into a STEEP what I wouild call a dive. Actually had to hold arm rests to keep from sliding off seat. Looked around everyone is whitefaced and gripping arm rests. Cockpit door is still open so can hear everything from there. The alarm bells are ringing and the recorded voice is saying (in English) PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP...this continues, bells ringing, voice saying PULL UP and we continue to dive toward the earth. The old Spanish lady across from me is praying and screaming and another is saying the Rosary. Oh my god I thought it is all over we are all dead. Suddenly the plane leveled off, then landed and taxied up to the Zurich terminal. Praise god we made it. As we left the plane we could see the pilot and co-pilot exchanging very heated words and both very red faced. So I assumed one of them had screwed up. Next week a friend took the same flight and as I met him at the airport he was white faced and when he told me what happened it was exactly like my flight so now I assume that is the "normal" Iberia approach to Zurich. On a another Iberia flight Madrid-Zurich a month later we did not experience this but we also approached Zurich from another direction. SO I don't know but I do know I was really scared

This did not happen to me but is a story I love to tell. A Doctor friend of mine was on a plane when the flight attendant came by and asked him to quietly follow her--they went into the cockpit and there was the pilot----dead. The co-pilot asked him if he thought they should land the plane--My friend thought about it and asked where the pilot lived which was where they were heading (and where my friend lived) and suggested they just keep going--he was going to be dead no matter where they landed.

These are wonderful, hilarious, and scary – this is Fodors at its best. Mine involved a flight from Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to Moscow one very hot August day in the 70s. We (maybe 200) were loaded on an Aeroflot Ilyushin 62 (4-engine jet with a reputation for being underpowered) at around 4 in the afternoon. I estimate the temperature outside was maybe 110F (43C). We taxied out to the end of the runway, whereupon the pilot obviously felt there was a broken gauge or something because he proceeded to switch off the air conditioning in the cabin and do a “static test” of his engines, revving them up one at a time, making the plane roar and tremble, but go nowhere. This went on for minutes, then more minutes, then more minutes. After maybe a half hour the temperature inside the plane was well into the sauna range, maybe 120F or so, and people were making major noise. Still the testing goes on. (The problem, I and some others recognized, is called “density altitude.” Tashkent is located at a high altitude to begin with, and the hot air means the already thin high altitude air is even thinner, meaning planes need a lot of ground speed to take off. Hence the engine tests.) After 45 minutes the man sitting next to me (a doctor from Calcutta, where they know heat) said he was worried he was going to faint. An old and very colorful Uzbek man (turban, white beard, flowing robes) a few rows ahead of me jumped out of his seat and, howling, pulled out a (decorative?) curved knife and started waving it around over his head in the aisle. He was gang-tackled by two Aeroflot cabin attendants (the Press sisters, methinks) and strapped into his seat with seatbelt extenders, screaming all the time. I am not making this up. This must have been noticed up front because they almost immediately pushed the throttles all the way out the front of the plane and it vaulted down the runway like a bat out of Tashkent. It rolled and rolled and faster and faster and we are still stuck to the runway, faster and… the nose comes up, the wheels extend (the bang you sometimes hear at takeoff) and the pavement ends and it’s now weeds and sand about 6 inches below the spinning wheels (I can see out the window.) We are flying, but just – and I mean just – barely. The air conditioning is still off, and the interior of the plane is now the hottest place I’ve ever been, including Atlanta in August. People have fainted. Oh, damn, the captain thinks, time for the A.C. So they switch it on (or he opens a window at 20,000 feet) and the temperature inside the cabin falls by 100 degrees, just like that. There is so much accumulated perspiration in the air that the system can’t handle it and it distills out on anything metallic, most specifically the air nozzles and the metal strips running along the bottom edge of the overhead shelf (pre-bins.) It rains on us. It is not a pleasant experience. By the time we reached Moscow about half the passengers including me were coming down with colds or worse. I checked into the Hotel Rossiya on Red Square, billed at that time as the biggest hotel in the world. We are informed that the kitchen’s supplies are limited unfortunately, and the only things available for a late meal are bananas. Oh, there’s champagne, too. That’s it – bananas and champagne. All I could think of was the words to “Back in the USSR.” You don’t know how lucky you are, boy…

ttt I'd love to hear another.