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Crazy airplane moments

Cape Town - Is it just us or have some seriously strange things been happening on planes recently?

Sure, the only way we know about all of these incidents is due to mobile technology and social media, so it could really just be a case of suddenly having access to information we weren't privy to before... or is there more to it? 

From misbehaving passengers to cracking cabin interiors and runway collisions, here's a round-up of some of the weirdest plane-related incidents from the past couple of weeks:

Plane's cabin interior cracks mid-air


Imagine sitting in your airplane seat, all unassuming, enjoying the view from 35 000 feet when suddenly you start hearing popping noises and the cabin walls start tearing at the seams right in front of your eyes. Pretty scary, right?

Well, this is exactly what happened to passengers on board an American Airlines flight between San Francisco, California and Dallas, Texas who told AP how they felt the fuselage violently shake and heard popping noises coming from outside of the Boeing as it made its initial ascent.

Then they watched in horror and screamed for the flight attendants to come as interior panels on both sides of the aircraft pulled apart from the walls. Citing a blown air duct as the possible cause, the captain of the Boeing 757 decided to turn around and head back to the take-off location.

Read more here

Plane cabin fills with smoke



A passenger on board a Jet Blue flight heading to Austin, Texas from Long Beach Airport in California captured a truly terrifying scene on video in September when their airplane's cabin started filling up with smoke and the pilot calmly announced that one of the engines had failed.

PANIC STATIONS!

Read more about the incident here

Plane engine catches fire
 



Just a few short weeks before this, a passenger on board a flight between Spain and Russia caught something even more terrifying on camera: a plane engine on fire... just outside her window seat. 

The incident apparently happened shortly after take-off and the Transaero plane was immediately rerouted back to Barcelona Airport where it performed an emergency landing. While no one was injured, passengers did have to wait a full 24 hours before being able to catch another flight to their destination. 

Check out the video here

Ryanair planes clip wings while taxiing to the runway

Pre-dawn prep for take-off ended badly for two Ryanair Boeing 737s at Dublin Airport earlier this month, when they collided while taxiing to the runway. Passengers with window seats on both planes saw the entire incident play out before their eyes, with some capturing the aftermath, which included the top of one of the winglets being torn off and getting lodged in the other's tail, on camera and sharing on social media.

The airline said in a statement that both aircraft were following instructions from Dublin Airport Air Traffic Control at the time. SCARY!

Read more about the incident here

It is not only the mechanics of aircraft that can make a flight scary, but awful fellow passengers can be a serious turn off too! Like these people:

Passenger makes Ebola joke, gets escorted off flight



Seriously?! When will people learn that airports and airplanes are no place to crack controversial jokes? Especially about explosives and communicable diseases. 

A passenger on board a US Airways flight from Philadelphia to the Dominican Republic obviously never got THAT memo, as he jokingly told fellow passengers that he had been infected by the highly contagious Ebola virus. It was not met with good humour and a HazMat squad kitted out in full protective gear got deployed to the aircraft to remove the offending passenger. 

Read more here.

D
runk passenger spews all sorts of craziness, gets live tweeted by fellow flyer



Ryan Case, an award-winning editor for the popular comedy show, Modern Family, recently found herself on board an aircraft with 'the worst person in the world' - a very, very drunk woman called Nadia, who had no qualms about making sweeping offensive statements about the Middle East and its inhabitants to the, ahem, Middle Eastern man sitting next to her.

Appalled by the crazy behaviour, along with most of the other passengers, Case decided to live tweet the woman's insane rantings, enthralling her followers with side-splitting commentary. 

Check the story out here
 

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