Crazy tales of flying high—and not flying at all.
HIGH FLYIN’
The control tower at a small airport in Schoengleida, Germany, received a perplexing call over the radio in September 2009: “Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?” the pilot demanded. When the controller asked the pilot to identify himself, he replied only with, “Come on, I know you’re down there!” It took a few more questions to determine that the 65-year-old Cessna pilot had had several drinks before taking off and was still drinking while he was flying. The controllers dispatched a rescue helicopter to find him and guide him to the runway. During the search, the pilot sang songs, told a mother-in-law joke, and urged them to hurry up because he had a party to go to. The helicopter finally found the inebriated pilot, who sang more songs as he followed it home. He actually made a decent landing, but then stumbled out of his plane and drove away. Airport authorities alerted police, who caught him a few miles later. He’s been banned from driving a car or flying a plane ever again.
In 2009 a fistfight broke out in the cockpit of an Indian Airlines flight bound for New Delhi and then spilled out into the main cabin. According to witnesses, the male co-pilot, a male purser, and a female flight attendant were “slugging it out” in front of everyone. The purser was apparently defending the honor of the flight attendant, who’d complained that the co-pilot had tried to hold her hand. When she refused, he pushed her into the cockpit door “with such force that she started bleeding.” The purser said that the pilots became abusive when he confronted them. The pilots later blamed the fight on the purser. An airline official called the incident “shocking.”
“People got off the plane and were kissing the ground and praying. There were little girls sobbing.” That was the scene described by one of the passengers preparing to board a Thomas Cook Airlines plane on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 2009. Making the London-bound passengers even more nervous: the announcement instructing them to disregard their seat assignments and crowd together in the back of the plane. (The jet’s rear loading door was jammed, and their luggage could only be stored in the front cargo bay.) The final straw: As the arriving passengers walked into the airport, several warned, “Don’t get on that plane! It was the worst flight ever!” Not wanting to act as ballast, 71 people refused to board and booked flights on other airlines. The remaining passengers had a rough but otherwise uneventful flight to London.
Scholars are now using plagiarism-detection software to confirm the authors of historic works.
A wingless Boeing 737 got stuck in traffic on a crowded street in Mumbai, India, in 2007. How’d it get there? The decommissioned plane was being towed to New Delhi when the truck driver took a wrong turn. A low bridge blocked the way, and the road was too narrow for the truck to turn around. So the driver got out, walked off, and didn’t return. The massive fuselage sat on the busy street for the rest of the day…and the next day, and the day after that. Local business owners complained that the behemoth was blocking access to their shops; others appreciated all of the tourists who came out to gawk at it. A week later, in the middle of the night, it disappeared. There was no official word on who finally took the plane, or where it ended up.
For 79 tense minutes, air traffic controllers couldn’t make contact with a Northwest Airlines jet carrying 144 passengers from San Diego to Minneapolis in 2009. Fearing the worst, the military readied fighter jets to intercept the plane. After the airliner had overshot its destination by 150 miles, the captain finally radioed to traffic controllers that everyone onboard was okay. The tower asked, “Do you have time to give a brief explanation of what happened?” “Just cockpit distractions,” said the pilot. “That’s all I can say.” So what did happen up there? After the plane landed safely, the pilots claimed they’d been going over scheduling issues on their laptops and lost track of the time. Aviation experts were skeptical; one said it was “more plausible that the pilots had fallen asleep.”
Bad car-ma: When exposed to traffic noise, zebra finches are more likely to cheat on their mates.