Flight attendants are always meeting new travelers, so it’s no surprise they’ve gathered some funny, scary and just plain bizarre stories along the way.
Consider yourself lucky you weren’t on these flights and maybe be a little nicer to your flight attendant on your next trip.
– “One of the most random questions I have ever heard was from a lady who asked me how the emergency slides reached the ground, a normal question you may think. But the lady asked me as we were cruising at 39,000 feet. She believed that the slides could be inflated from up there and reach the ground!”
– “We were in the middle of boarding and a little old lady comes up to me in an absolute panic because she realized that she left her teeth in a bathroom in the airport. She was really upset because it was Thanksgiving, and she was visiting her family, and she needed her teeth to eat. I spent 10 minutes talking to the captain and people at the gate to try and locate her teeth. They were found eventually, but the plane had to leave, so we had to FedEx them to her.”
– “I was in the back in the plane during boarding because I was in charge of getting the galley together. Someone comes up to me and asks if she can have a glass of ice water. I told her I didn’t have my ice broken up yet, but I could give her a normal cup of water. Then she goes, ‘Never mind, I’m allergic to water that doesn’t have ice in it.'”
– “A grown man dressed as an elf walked onto the aircraft and showed us his boarding pass like everything was normal. He was a tall man, probably in his 60s or 80s. He was pretty drunk. He wasn’t being offensive to anyone; we just weren’t going to serve him any more alcohol. We couldn’t ask him to leave the plane because he wasn’t doing anything wrong but the other passengers were kind of looking at us for reactions. I could barely look at him without laughing. He was just sitting in the end seat dressed as an elf, while everyone was dressed normally. It wasn’t even that close to Christmas. I think it was October.”
It’s unsettlingly common to see items of clothing left behind on a flight. “The most random has to be the single and very expensive Christian Louboutin shoe. How the [heck] can you leave behind one shoe? Surely you would notice the limp you’d inevitably have as you disembarked, one foot six inches higher than the other. The female passenger in question, a minor TV ‘star’, had been enjoying the perks of first class and was rather worse for wear as she got off the aircraft at JFK. Blissfully unaware she was missing a shoe, the crew thankfully reunited her with the designer heel before she reached the top of the air-bridge.”
These are the well deserved perks a flight attendant is entitled to I say!! After their encounters with boorish, arrogant and plain irritating passengers, they have rightfully earned this privilege of mirth and merriment.
Interesting and funny indeed. Being a flight attendant is not that easy. It really requires tolerance and patience. Just imagine how one could leave one shoe in the plane. Thanks for sharing this stories.