Most people love to travel, but hate traveling. Airports have gone from a place of adventuresome departure to being widely considered as a more dreaded hellhole than the DMV. Passengers are rude, airline staff are worse, and airport security guards tend to have the combined IQ of a jar of mayonnaise. Air travel has become one globular nexus of awfulness, and that means good stories of airplane drama! These are the 12 best air travel freak outs in recent memory, don’t be any of these guys!
Steven Slater is So Over JetBlue
If you’re going to quit your job, why not do it in the most dramatic way possible? Steven Slater had did just that when he snapped one day on the tarmac at his job as a flight attendant onboard a JetBlue plane, after getting verbally assaulted by a rude passenger. He took to the intercom, called out that passenger (and anyone else who had ever pissed him off), announced that they could go eff themselves and proceeded to deplane by way of the emergency inflatable slide — but not before grabbing a couple of bottles of Blue Moon beer, first. He’s been called a “working class hero,” but when it comes down to it, he’s just a guy who got pissed off, and he got arrested for his trouble. Apparently, those slides aren’t cheap.
The Senator’s Tantrum
Senator David Vitter of Louisiana had a bad day last year when he missed his flight home at Dulles International. He got to his plane just minutes after the door was shut, and that made Mr. Senator very angry. He demanded to be let onboard, unleashing the full fury of a pretentious politician and his “do you know who I am” rhetoric. When an employee tried to dissuade him from the impossibility, Vitter shoved him aside and opened the hatch himself. An alarm sounded at that point, and instead of following through with his ego-trip, Vitter ran away (literally).
Drunk Shenanigans
It doesn’t get any funnier, more disgusting, or more classic than this. Gerald Finneran was a rich executive on a United Airlines flight from New York to Buenos Aires back in 1995. To put it simply, he got drunk — really drunk, and he didn’t like the idea of getting his booze cut off by the flight attendants. He grabbed his own liquor from the cart and fought off the attendants, yelled at them, and pushed them around. Finneran wasn’t nearly finished with his drunken tirade yet, though. He dropped his trousers and shat right on the food cart, in the middle of the first class compartment, in front of the President of Portugal. As if that wasn’t enough, he used the fancy linen cloth napkins for toilet paper, and wiped the rest all over the counters, seats, and anything else he could get his hands on. He also tracked what fell on the floor throughout the plane. His over-the-top shenanigans earned him a spot on Letterman’s Top 10 List and 2 years of community service — along with $55,000 in various fines and reimbursements.
Revenge Powder
If this one had happened 20 years ago, the airline, police, and any nearby passengers would have simply chuckled at the crazy man and gone about their business. Since it happened in 2008, Arthur Nicolson got a bit more attention than that when he stormed off a plane while shaking his bottle of Dr. Scholl’s Foot Powder at all the flight attendants and passengers in his path. Nicolson allegedly yelled “this is what your airline gets for treating me bad” while doing it — he was apparently pissed off that his flight had been delayed for over 10 hours, and thought that some foot powder might be enough to satisfy his hunger for revenge against US Airways.
Throwing Punches
Alright now, it’s been a rule for a long time that smoking simply isn’t allowed onboard planes anymore. Is it really that difficult to understand? Apparently it is for Christina Elizabeth Szele, of New York, who got herself good and drunk before boarding her JetBlue flight to San Francisco. Once there, she kept drinking, and then she felt the inevitable urge to light up — so she did, right in her seat. The flight attendant tried to put a stop to that, but Szele launched a furious verbal assault with every curse and racial slur she could muster in defense of her right to smoke on an airplane. When that didn’t work, she punched the attendant in the face, which added to her list of charges. She was arrested in Denver after the pilot diverted the plane and landed early.
Naomi Campbell Attacks
Hellbeast Naomi Campbell can get pretty scrappy — just ask her housekeeper — but nobody expected her to lash out at police and airline staff like she did back in 2008 when she was informed that her luggage had been lost. Recognizing that she was who she was, the captain attempted to assuage her and present her with options, but she flew into a rage and screamed “how dare you tell me what my options are? You are not leaving until you find my f****** bags!” She then proceeded to call him a racist, and held up the flight for about an hour before being hauled off the plane by police. When one of the officers summoned tried to grab her by the arm to get her off the plane (which she refused to leave), she went into a berserker rage and started hitting him with — you guessed it — her phone! Oh Naomi, when will you learn that communications devices are not meant to be used as weapons?
The Angry Pilot
Pilots have bad days, too. Northwest Airlines had to cancel a flight with 180 passengers on board when a pilot arrived at the plane in Las Vegas in a foul temper, arguing and cursing to an unknown caller on his cellphone. When some passengers asked him about it, probably fearing that he was a bit too distraught to be trusted with their lives, he flew off the handle even more and turned his anger on them instead. Police were called to the scene, and they pulled the pilot aside to interview him — but never gave him a field sobriety test. His name was never given to the media, but he was pulled from the flight and flown to Detroit to be interviewed again, but this time by his corporate overlords.
Cat Fight
So we’ve seen a flight attendant lose it due to abuse by customers, and a pilot with a temper tantrum, but this takes the cake when it comes to airline employees losing their cool. Granted, these folks didn’t ever make use of the emergency slide, but these Delta Airlines flight attendants still represent: A flight from Rochester, NY to Atlanta was canceled just before takeoff when the pilot got on the intercom and told all the passengers that they had to get off the plane because his flight attendants were in the middle of a fistfight. Passengers called the local news station and told them that they “got kicked off the plane” because “the stewardesses were fighting.” Ah, Delta.
Dave Chappelle Freaks
Celebrities will probably freak out regardless of whether they’re flying first class or on a private jet, but heavy drug-use probably plays a role in this case. Dave Chappelle, while on a flight from New Jersey to Ohio, wigged out and started harassing the pilot, repeatedly asking how much longer the flight would be. At one point he even grabbed the pilots arms while he was flying the plane. Sensing that things were a bit off, the pilot decided to land early, in Pittsburg. Chappelle holed up in a hotel for the evening, but then he started harassing the hotel employees instead, insisting that he leave in a rental car for Ohio — but he couldn’t remember where he lived.
Ivana Trump Likes to Yell at Kids
Ivana Trump hates kids! At least, that’s what it looked like when the aging (read: seriously old) socialite blew her lid on a Delta-Northwest plane parked at Palm Beach, FL. She had apparently been unable to handle a few minutes of kids running up and down the aisle during boarding, and started barking at them with obscenities and calling them “little f***ers” right in front of their parents. The pilot tried to eject her himself, but she then went from loud and angry to loud, angry, furious and physical. Cops were called and she had to be hauled off the plane, but no charges were filed since she is, after all, rich as hell.
Mid-air Scuffle
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, there’s something even more ridiculous that supersedes the rest. In October of last year, an Air India flight from the UAE to Delhi landed with a whole lot more hurt feelings, bruises and black eyes than it had when it departed. Both pilots were involved in a mid-air brawl with flight attendants, and the passengers got to watch it happen as it spilled out of the cockpit and into the galley. According to the flight attendants, one of the pilots sexually harassed one of their own, and they were retaliating. The pilots claimed that the attendants were covering for a male cohort who had acted out of hand and been reprimanded by the pilots. Police were obviously called to investigate once the plane landed, but with that kind of he-said-she-said and the politics of (at least somewhat well-off) pilot vs. (middle-class at best) attendant, we might never know who was telling the truth on that one.
Kevin Smith: Too Fat to Fly?
Who could forget the drama from earlier this year when director Kevin Smith was booted from a Southwest flight for being “too fat to fly?” Smith had bought two seats, as per Southwest’s “customers of size” policy, but he had chosen a standby option to board an earlier flight — which only had one seat available. So, once seated on the plane, Smith was ejected for being too fat. Instead of losing his cool and becoming irate in a cabin full of onlookers, Smith left the plane and unleashed the full fury of his Twitter account at Southwest Airlines. His best tweet came after he had boarded another Southwest flight and flown to his final destination: “Hey @SouthwestAir I’ve landed in Burbank. Don’t worry: wall of the plane was opened & I was airlifted out while Richard Simmons supervised.”
