Airline staff and passengers recount the most bizarre things they’ve seen on planes

From having to keep track of children to serving someone directly after they have vomited – airline staff have seen it all

Flight attendants (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images)

Airline staff have truly seen it all. From rescuing babies trapped in overhead lockers to tending passengers being drowned in falling maggots – there isn’t a bizarre situation they haven’t had to deal with.

Passengers, airline staff and ground crew shared their most bizarre tales on online forum Reddit and they range from the odd to the truly disgusting.

One flight attendant known on the site as transatlantique, described how a passenger threw up in front of her before requesting a drink. “Parked my cart, asked a guy what he wanted to drink. He started to answer, then held up a finger, puked into a plastic grocery bag, and then went on to ask me for a gingerale.

“I was speechless,” they wrote, adding that they handed the man the whole can of gingerale for handling himself so well.

One passenger said they were on a near empty flight and ended up playing cards with the flight attendants. User 907-586-2159 said the attendants recounted numerous stories, one of which involved a man who attempted to lick a female flight attendant every time she had to reach across him to hand food or drink to their adjacent passenger.

“Another guy stripped down to his boxers because ‘the seat felt bad’ on his pants,” the user added.

User thearcheress has a cousin who is a flight attendant and who once had to rescue a baby from an overhead locker.

“One of her duties is to make sure all infants on the flight are accounted for. On this flight there were supposed to be three infants and she could find only two,” they wrote. “She looked up the seat assignment and went up to the passengers who were supposed to have the third. They were a couple, very young and very obviously from a rural area.

“When she asked them where their baby was, they pointed to the overhead bin. Apparently this was their first flight ever and they thought the overhead bin was some kind of baby carrier. My cousin had to rescue the baby and very sternly ask his parents to keep him on their lap.

Other stories are simply disgusting. User BatMally was a customer service representative at Southwest Airlines, and said their favourite story is about a gentleman who had an unfortunate accident in the bathroom.

“As he flushed and opened the gooseneck valve to the tank, the plane hit a pocket of dead air and dropped like 15 feet vertically. Everything in the tank proceeded upwards at the speed of gravity. He was...covered. They had to hose him off on the tarmac upon arrival,” they wrote.

little_mermarx’s mother is a flight attendant, and says this story about an incident on a transatlantic flight has always haunted them: “Halfway through the flight near the back of the plane, the overhead bin started raining maggots on the passengers in one row - just pouring through.

“One of the other flight attendants on the plane investigated and discovered that a passenger had flown in from Africa and was traveling to the US via Europe, and had a whole dead fish filled with maggots wrapped inside a newspaper (apparently it's considered a delicacy in some parts of the world).”

But even among the gross tales of vomit and maggots, flight attendants also manage to have fun. User dragonfly120 said: “We flew to Vegas and back this week and they told us they were out of alcohol. People audibly gasped before they realised the flight attendants were giggling.”