Wind sheer on approach to IAH. Dude.

Other than a ground emergency during a C-5 maintenance engine run, it was while I was off-duty. I was helping our squadron's booster club with cleaning a contract commercial plane at Prince Sultan AB, Saudi Arabia. Suddenly one of the stewardesses started screaming. I hadn't noticed but the flight engineer had raised the flaps while the jet mech was changing a light in the wing. I ran up to the cockpit, danger tags all over the place. I wanted to beat the bastard. I don't know whether the poor guy made it.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BuckRogers2000,

No real problems with planes. Now helicopters, that’s another issue.......

Two rows away from a small boy who screamed for 7 solid hours.

flashguy

SNAKES!! ON THE MUHFUCKIN' PLANE!!

My first ever trans-Atlantic flight, to Italy in like 1996 or '97.

Flew to Germany and took an Arab Airways flight to Rome. Only like 2 hours, maybe.

Massive pressure headache. Passengers actually allowed to smoke on the plane. Only food was a vile little sandwich. And, the piece de resistance: the seat behind me had two little Arab kids who literally kicked the seat the WHOLE flight and, when I was trying to control my headache, I see a little arm reach between the seat and steal my fucking food.

Second worst was another flight to Italy. About half the passengers were a large group of Italian teens returning to Italy from some conference in NYC. Chaperones were not actual adults. Was trying to sleep (since I actually was a chaperone for my group and thus needed to be alive when we arrived), and some child bodily crawled under the seat and tied my fucking shoes together.

I don't know what it is with shitty ass children and flights to Italy, but that seems to be my lot in life.

I was on an American Airlines MD-88 that lost an engine on takeoff.

It was unpleasant.

That time Southwest increased how many drink coupons were needed per drink. Luckily I had a handful of extras and the flight was only 45 minutes.

I have had only good experiences on planes but was looking for an excuse to share this.

I was gonna say it was experiencing a tail strike while seated in the very last row. National to Melbourne, FL, ended up taking 13 hours. I could have driven it. By the time we got there very much after midnight, my rental car was gone as was my hotel room.

But then I remembered the last time I ever asked for a window seat... and got trapped with a 300 plus pound stinky woman in the middle seat who went to sleep and wouldn't wake up. Couldn't get out to hit the head and thought I was gonna explode by the time I could.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zoom6zoom,

Pretty much anytime I have to sit in the back.

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
Once, they ran out of Chateau Latour bordeaux and I had to settle for Chateau Margaux.

Those hookers sure do pick some fancy names!

Lets see...

There's the inflight Emergency for the passenger who was having a heart attack. So me being the only MD on board had to make the call to divert to Reykjavik. On the ground, I had to go with the patient to the military hospital. MPs come running back to get me saying they are holding the plane for me. Got a nice letter from Delta for that fiasco - that was it.

Left San Juan PR headed to St Marrten in a 757 with 6 passengers only. Pilot taxied like a mad man, turned on the main and rolled on like a shot from a cannon. Went full ballistic on the rotation and kept the hammer down all the way. Flight was 20 min early at destination. Wasn't the smoothest of flights.

Charter flight from Andros Island. Cessna 403B. I was sitting right seat. Pilot I've known for 10+ years and he knew I flew. So he wanted to do paperwork and handed off the controls. Engines start sputtering and coughing …. I start to internally panic. "Forgot to switch back off the reserve fuel tank. I was emptying them out. Sorry"

I'm sure there are more.

Andrew

Probably when I flew from LA back to the east coast once (back in the 90's). I had a window seat, but the man next to me was probably well over 400 lbs and absolutely needed a portion of my seat area/personal space for the journey.

We first sat on the tarmac (as they say) for 3-4 hours while they attempted to fix the little lights along the center row floor of the aircraft. This was before the actual 3 hour or so flight. I'm a man of few words, but this man was a man of no words. He never said anything the entire time. I lost all feeling in my left side trying to contort my body to avoid physical contact, and after a while I just gave in and let myself sort of flow into him and just went with it. Great memories...

quote:

Originally posted by Sig2340:

At about FL27 we hit clear air turbulence, dropping about 6,000 feet inside of a minute.

That would have put you about 3,300' below sea level, digging a tunnel through the earth.

Two come to mind, and I fly about a dozen times a year for work these days.

Flying from Atlanta to Oklahoma City to resume Field Artillery OBC. A useless, mild-mannered solo Dad with his SCREAMING toddler. I mean that kid screamed full-volume for almost 3 hours straight and he'd try to shush the kid. Maybe had an ear infection. Everyone in the back half of the plane were frazzled as well as the flight attendants. One told the Dad when we landed, "please don't fly our airline again."

I've been crushed next to or between fat guys (I'm pretty husky) but one I sat next to a guy who was covered, as far as I can tell, in moles. I felt bad for him but my skin was crawling and I was plastered against the window in an attempt to no touch him.

Flying with a new F-14 pilot who had BARELY made the cut. I mean BARELY. Nice guy but his aviation bucket was OVERFLOWING and had been for awhile. He was busting his ass but some people just can't hack it; just the nature of the business. We'll call him "Rick".

Anyway, our Skipper (a pilot) was a cheese dick and didn't have the guts to not bring Rick with us as we deployed right after 9-11. Rick should have been left home and replaced with a pipe hitter from another squadron, as demanding combat ops were imminent.

There was all sorts of things Rick had problems with, like flying night formation, not having a mid-air collision with the lead aircraft, inflight refueling, etc. But by far the worst thing Rick did was landing on the carrier at night - our standard routine was 3 tries to land - 2 bolters or waveoffs, followed by the "No Grade" (barely safe but ugly) landing.

I had never experienced terror flying like I did with Rick. Sure, you had some hairy things happen occasionally but with Rick is was all the time, every flight. The RIOs in the squadron started referring to him as the "voice actuated auto-pilot", because when shit went sideways (mechanical issue with the plane inflight, or a change in the mission), Rick just locked up and did nothing. It got so bad that I would hope the plane would break before we took off, because I hated flying with Rick. HATED it.

Eventually I went to our OPSO and told him the guy couldn't hack it, regardless of what the Skipper wanted. Rick was going to get people killed, most importantly me, and we were due to start combat flying in a few days - Rick lacked the basic skills to do everything we needed to do. So while we flew the first day of OEF combat ops, he got a day practice landing period with the head Landing Signal Officers (LSOs) watching; afterwards he never flew the F-14 again.

On a flight with open seating, the last seat I see is next to a lovely woman, who gets lovlier the closer I get. Her husband is on the other side reading and doesn't engage in the constant conversation she and I have during the flight.

I depart the plane after we both acknowledge enjoying pleasant conversation. Once in the terminal I see at a distance, her husband possibly ripping her for engaging in conversation during the flight.

That negativity harshed my buzz resulting from the honor of being close to and engaging about as pretty a woman as can be seen.

Seeing a theme here, they should make people who are North of say 300 lbs buy two seats.

MDS

Many years ago I was on a KLM flight from New York to Schiphol, Netherlands. Shortly after takeoff I ordered a beer from the hostess. I pulled down the tray from the seat in front of mine and set the glass of beer on it. Subsequently I rested my arms on the tray.

Unfortunately, something had prevented the tray from reaching its fully-down position. The weight of my arms suddenly achieved the fully-down position – and dumped the whole damned beer in my lap.

For the remainder of that long flight I was very uncomfortable with wet pants, and acutely embarrassed to walk along the aisle to the john – looked like I’d pissed my pants.

And it didn’t help that the tech that I’d brought along said, “I’m surprised that an experienced guy like you would do that.”