As someone with with severe flight anxiety, I have to admit that reading experience such as the ones in this post completely freaks me out. But hey, what doesn’t kill you… or something like that.
Here are a handful of the scariest things people have experienced on a flight!
“We were flying from SFO to LAX and had just begun or descent and all of a sudden the plane had the most violent turbulence I had ever experienced. It wasn’t the kind where the plane suddenly dropped, which is the kind I’m used to. It threw the plane to the left and knocked it almost completely perpendicular to its original position. My drink had just been picked up thank goodness and this big dude grabbed the arm of one of the flight attendants collecting trash to keep her from getting hurt I later found out. Everyone screamed. A few minutes later the pilot came on to explain we had accidentally been caught in wake turbulence from a bigger airplane. Wake turbulence has since really freaked me out.”
“I am not crew, but my stepfather is a commercial pilot (or was, he is retired now).
He told us once he had a fight with this guy who happened to be his copilot on his next flight, so they were not talking to each other. During the landing, they almost crashed… because they still were not talking to each other. My stepdad blames the fucking idiot, I think both of them were fucking idiots.”
“We were supposed to go from Chicago to Buffalo but there was an insane snow storm happening. We spent an hour on the Chicago tarmac getting deicing fluid on the wings. Once we were in the air there was insane turbulence. We approached Buffalo and it felt like we were on a roller coaster as the plane went up and down as we circled the runway. After about a half hour of this the pilot said that we couldn’t land due to the snow and we only had about a half hour or so left of fuel so we were going to try and make it to Albany. Made it to Albany safely at 4 a.m”
“Was onboard an A343 Swiss Air flight from Cairo to Zurich back in 2011. The flight was lovely up until we were above the Alps. Of course, I was seated on a window seat right next to the wing towards the front, so I could see both engines. There were some mesmerizing clouds tens of thousands of feet high, and I was enjoying the scenery. Then out of nowhere we drop 1000 feet in a matter of seconds, seatbelt sign was deactivated. Okay, fine. Flight continues peacefully.
We then became easily compared to a powerball number about to drop out of the plastic tube thing. All I see is the engines shaking violently and hearing what sounded like cracking. People not wearing their seatbelts flew out of their seats, personal belongings from the overhead compartments were flying all over the place… It was terrible. We were probably mere meters away from the peaks of the Alps. Everybody started praying. The person next to me held onto me saying they don’t want to die alone.”
“Not crew myself, but my gf is.
She used to fly for a domestic Thai airline. Bangkok to Changmai or something similar. Anyway, after the plane had landed and she had said thank you to all the passengers, the pilot walks out of the cockpit looking a little worse for wear. Why? One of the windows had come off the cockpit. Luckily they weren’t flying too high when it happened, but damn that shits scary.”
“Cruising along 7 miles high, the outter pane of the windshield directly infront of my side absolutely shattered into a thousand pieces. It sounded like someone fired a shotgun in the cockpit. We ended up diverting. Got on the ground safely and waited for a spare airplane to be sent so we can continue. Imagine watching this happen directly in front of your face and being told a few hours later to go back up and try again.”
“We were approaching Narsarsuaq, Greenland and just about to touch the runway. The landing was a bit tricky so we were wobbling a bit due to wind and stuff. I was looking out the window enjoying the beautiful scenery of rocks and dirt as the right tip tank dipped dangerously close to the ground. A few more inches and the tank would’ve scraped the ground, causing who knows what and if we survived, We’d be grounded in fucking Narsarsuaq. I talked to my dad(the pilot) and he had no idea that it was that close.”
“Some guy was sick as hell and was lying behind curtains cramping on the floor, he was close to dying, luckily there was a doctor onboard the plane. We arrived 2 hours earlier than expected, and when we landed we were instructed to stay in our seates for like 15 minutes because an ambulance crew got on and helped the poor guy.”
“Someone died. He was traveling alone so we just put a blanket over him till we were able to land. No one knew except for the doctor that had been helping us onboard. We had moved everyone sitting next to him in order for the doctor to help him so the doctor just sat next to the guy for the rest of the flight. We had to make an emergency stop. The guest knew someone on board was sick cause we made an announcement asking for a doctor but the didn’t know the guy getting taken off the flight was dead. It was a crazy day.”
“Not mine, but a friend shared her experience when she started work as a cabin crew. She was in charge of locking the plane door. Mid flight she realised that there was strange flapping sound, and discovered she had not secured the door properly. There was a really small piece of string (not sure what) that was stuck between the door and the jamb.”
“I was on a direct flight from Portland to New York. We were midway across the country nearing Chicago when the lights flicker off then on again and the entertainment system cuts out. The captain comes on and says a system has failed and they need to turn “everything” off. Then the whole plane goes dark, the engines turn off and the only sound I could hear was the wind outside and people praying. We slowly, slowly begin descending as we lose speed. But still nothing but wind. We must have lost about 5000ft in altitude but eventually the lights pop back on and the engines spun back up. I can only imagine what was going on in the cockpit.”
“I remember once I was on a flight and there was something wrong with the fish dinner option, so like half the passengers and crew got really sick. There was a doctor on board but there wasn’t much he could do because he was also a locksmith. The worst part was that there was this little girl who needed to get a transplant operation and the only person there who could help her was a nun who was also on the flight.
It’s crazy because I only got on that flight to try and convince my girlfriend not to leave me, but since I’d flown in the Korean war I had to override the autopilot and land the plane. My old CO talked me down, step by step, which was pretty difficult because I’d only ever flown single-engine airplanes, and this one had four! What made it worse what that I hated his guts, though he didn;t know that. Anyway, everyone was saved, got my girl back, and what’s more I managed to get over my drinking problem as well, so it was a pretty good time.”
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