<p>One of our close family friends who is 21 had an awful flight. He sat with a crazy woman that the airline didn’t team to be a big enough threat to contain so they basically left if to him and a fellow passenger ( a 60 something woman ) It ended with her stripping naked in the aisle after telling all of the surrounding passengers how and when they were going to die …
He stood up and ordered her to put her clothes back on ( again , no help from airline personnel
He was so traumatized that he didn’t even approach the airline after the red eye flight</p>
<p>Wow–poor guy but glad he was able to handle the situation. Awful the flight crew didn’t help in the situation.</p>
<p>“They couldn’t land in Tel Aviv because Lebanese law prohibits contact with Israel in essentially any way. I’m with you: they could have landed in Cyprus or in Turkey but Damascus is only a few miles from Beirut.”</p>
<p>It’s easy to second guess someones’ decision, but we really have no idea of all the factors involved. There are many different things to consider, and not much time to do so. Where ATC advised the crew to go to, the weather, crew familiarity with airports, what scheduled divert fields were, what the length of the runways were, the landing aids, you can go on and on forever. Certainly when someone is running low on fuel, the time element is critical and at some point they are just looking for a suitable runway with adequate facilities and decent weather that is close, and it’s pretty complicated in that area of the world. It is amazing to me that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often, with as little extra gas they are putting on flights nowadays.</p>
<p>I was recently on an Iberia Air flight in Spain.</p>
<p>This flight had the closest together seats of any flight I have ever been on. I literally could not put my legs together in front of my seat because there was not enough room to wedge my knees.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the seats also fully reclined, which put the back of the seat in front of you literally 3 inches from your nose if you didn’t also recline.</p>
<p>Well, across the aisle a guy reclined his seat into the face of the woman behind him, who promptly reclined her seat into the face of the guy behind her. That guy was pretty fat, and with the seat in front of him fully reclined, he could not put his tray table down to put his drink on, because it hit his stomach. And he was not going to take this.</p>
<p>The resulting floor show was pretty amusing.</p>
<p>Thank god that flight was only an hour.</p>
<p>Wow, that sounds pretty uncomfortable for all concerned. Sounds like a good airline to avoid, whenever possible, especially if your flight may be longer than an hour. Guess you have to look behind you to be sure you don’t harm the person behind you when you recline your seat?</p>
<p>One of my favorite websites:</p>
<p>[Airline</a> Seating Charts - Best Airplane Seats - SeatGuru](<a href=“http://www.seatguru.com/]Airline”>http://www.seatguru.com/)</p>
<p>I obsessively look up every flight I’m booked on and make sure I don’t get a red seat.</p>
<p>Thanks for the seatguru site–wish I’d known about that long time ago!</p>
<p>“Even excluding Tel Aviv, the next closest international airport to Beirut besides Damascus is only 80 miles greater distance from Beirut. Also, if they knew that Beirut would be unsuitable for some reason (but Damascus in a civil war was suitable???), Nicosia would have meant stopping a bit short rather than flying beyond the original destination, if fuel was a concern.”</p>
<p>Going the route from Paris to Beirut, you would not divert to Tel Aviv if you are running out of gas. It is further. You would have had to make the decision to divert much earlier if you were going to stop short in Turkey, because they were probably already way past it. From where they might have made the decision, it might have been further to turn around and go to Cyprus rather than to continue. My wild guess is that they realized at the last minute that they were not going make it, and there was an airport right in front of them with two long runways and navigational aids. You’d have to be really short of gas to choose to land only 80 miles away, but sometimes a combination of unexpected headwinds, weather, ATC vectors can make for a higher fuel burn than planned. They probably should have made an earlier decision to divert, but sometimes there are surprises.</p>
<p>And when your other choice is to attempt a water landing in the ocean, the best choice is obviously to put it down on a runway, even if it’s an unfriendly situation. Sure, they make the news having to ask passengers to fork out cash, but they stay on the front page for much longer if they crash.</p>
<p>This was not on the flight but in the security line. I had a business select ticket so I got to go through the “faster” priority security line. The guy in front of me filled up THREE of those grey bins…and I mean FILLED them. He went through the scanner, and they sent him back. He was wearing cargo pants with at least ten pockets that needed to be emptied (there were multiple announcements made about emptying pockets). He proceeded to fill six of those round containers with the stuff in his pockets. He went through and they then patted him down.</p>
<p>I had a small bag, nothing to take out. Unbelievable.</p>
<p>A few years ago we were on Mauii when a grass fire closed the northern part of the highway for three days. When it came time to leave there were hundreds of people from cancelled flights hanging around at the airport waiting to get onto other, already full flights. They were offering nice compensation if you would give up your seat <em>but</em>, only at the gate and wouldn’t promise to get your luggage back to you. Many stressed families crowded into too small an area and putting pressure on the poor gate agents.
Oh, and add that the recording about not leaving your luggage unattended was frozen on a 90 second loop…
Every 90 seconds. For over an hour. The entire airport staff was going crazy.
We finally got on board (NOT in the seats we had booked ). The woman in the aisle seat next to me spent the entire 6 hour flight sighing, groaning and shifting position because she didn’t fit in the seat. OK, the rows are too close for your 6’3" legs. I understand. You are really tall. The seats aren’t wide enough for your big hips…I understand but have less sympathy when your butt gyrations move the armrest up and down and I feel your thigh against mine under the armrest…the loud sighs and verbal expressions of frustrations over not fitting in the seat, for 6hours - no sympathy. You are very large. Unless this is your first flight, this isnt a surprise. Book two tickets, pay for first class or shut up and sit still. Moaning, groaning, sighing and being a pain to your seat mates isn’t going to cause the plane to suddenly grow a new seat just for you.</p>
<p>Just heard on the news that there will be another row of seats ADDED to existing space on airplanes for United & other airlines–am sure that will add to our comfort, or at least their bottom line!</p>
<p>If you cannot have Art removed, add neither. Do you realize what thread this is though? You may want to repost in a more relevant thread or start your own. :)</p>
<p>Bringing up an old thread :D</p>
<p>Once, I flew to europe from CA. Turned out there were european firemen who had been doing some kind of internship (?) in CA and were returning to their country. The FA from the same country spent the whole time flirting with them ( here’s my number, call me hu! I would looove to go to that party with you)’. The passengers would ask her for drinks etc. And wouldnt get them because she was too busy chatting with them.</p>
<p>Reminds me of a favorite announcement made at the end of a flight in, I think, Germany: “Will the gentlemen who checked their knives, clubs and chains please pick them up from the flight attendant on the ramp.” (When I saw them, it made sense. Looked like a motorcycle gang.)</p>
<p>@Lergnom someone in this thread wrote about the exact same thing.</p>
<p>Not behavior, but I just had something really weird happen on our spring break trip. We were denied boarding at the gate because “we show you already boarded the plane”. After several minutes, with almost all the passengers onboard, we were allowed to enter the aircraft. When we went to our seats, people were sitting in them. They were foreign and didn’t appear to speak English. They showed us their boarding passes so we could see the seat number and the boarding passes HAD OUR NAMES ON IT. We were able to find seats in the back of the plane and Delta’s explanation was, “Glitches happen. Sorry. We added 3,000 miles to your account”.</p>
<p>Wait a minute, that’s not a glitch, that is scary. I would suspect theft and be concerned about terrorism. I would immediately raise bloody hell because these people might have snuck onto the airplane somehow. Though it probably was just an error, how did they get by security? This kind of thing has to be resolved before departure, who cares about delays.</p>
<p>You should request a better explanation and more miles. That is alarming and they need to specifically explain that. Use their customer care email, I do that when I have a problem and get a good response always.</p>
<p>It is alarming and I did contact customer service. This was their response, but I had to call them to explain that I didn’t use any kiosk. I printed all four boarding passes at home. Seats aren’t that big of a deal but NAMES are a big deal. All the gate attendants seemed to care about was shoving us on the plane and closing the door. My last comment to them was, “Couldn’t this be some type of fraud?”</p>
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<p>Woooowww… That is scary. So many questions need to be answered.</p>