4

A Teenager Accidentally AirDropped A Fake Crime Scene Photo To All Passengers Within Bluetooth Range

AirDrop, for those of you who don't have the second job required to afford Apple products, is a Mac and iOS filesharing service. And it's not too hard to accidentally, ugh, "AirDrop" a file to every Bluetooth user in your vicinity. Which is how people sitting on a plane bound for Hawaii suddenly found themselves staring at this:

KGO-TV, San FransiscoWhich was graphic enough that we're gonna make you click to see it.

An individual would have probably written that off as a mistake, but when 15 passengers simultaneously received the same ominous image, it wasn't hard for them to imagine that they were fated to participate in a midair version of Saw. Flight attendants were alerted, and the plane stopped taxiing and returned to the gate. There, over the course of a 90-minute delay, it was determined that the photo was of a mannequin at a mock crime scene, and a teenager had been trying to send it to her mother but had accidentally blasted it to every eligible receiver on the plane.

Why mother and daughter were looking at a CSI training course was left infuriatingly unreported, but the embarrassed girl wasn't punished or blamed, and the airline spun the delay as a story of how great they are at calmly responding to alerts. In the end, the only real danger is from the several hack writers who'll crank out screenplays based on "What if this, but serious?!"

Related: 5 Ridiculous Myths About Air Travel You Probably Believe

3

Animals Keep Blocking Runways In Alaska And Puerto Rico

Airports do their best to keep animals at a safe distance. Birds, for instance, are driven away by making the habitat unattractive, using lasers and trained falcons to disrupt them and employing noise generators that play recorded predator calls, conversations about how dumb, ugly, and undateable the birds are, etc. But there's not much you can do to stop a 450-pound seal from lounging on your runway, because once an animal tops 400 pounds, it can do whatever the fuck it wants.

Scott Babcock/Alaska Dept. of TransportationWhich in this case seems to be "confirming every single stereotype about Alaska."

2

A Cat Escaped And Workers Had To Disassemble The Cockpit To Reach It

Flying with pets is tricky. Animals have to be moved somehow, but air travel is incomprehensible to beasts whose understanding of reality can be annihilated by blankets and screen doors. All you can really do is train them to be comfortable in a carrier for long stretches of time, do your best to keep them relaxed, and absolutely not let them get loose on the airplane. The owner of Ripples the cat did not succeed at that final task.

While boarding a 2012 flight from Halifax to Toronto, Ripples somehow got out of his carrier and prompted a hunt that rivaled the intensity of the search for the FBI's Most Wanted. The cabin was searched first, but when Ripples couldn't be found, it became clear that he had made it into the cockpit (the cockpit door generally stays open during boarding, because at that point, about the most any potential hijackers could do if they seized it would be to make dramatic flying noises).

But Ripples wasn't simply napping in the captain's chair; he had managed to squirm his way inside a panel and down into the wiring. So the passengers were marched off the plane, and maintenance crews came in to disassemble chunks of the cockpit while also checking to see if Ripples had done any damage. Thankfully he hadn't, and so the adorable riff on Alien took a mere four hours to sort out. The cat was frightened but otherwise fine, and once the cockpit was reassembled and tested, Ripples was able to fly without further issue. Thankfully the delay began at 5:40 a.m., a time when everyone is famously patient and understanding.

1

The Unscheduled Landing Caused By Two Passengers Getting Angry About Another Passenger's Farting

Getting crammed into a cramped metal cylinder full of crying babies and armrest wars isn't exactly a treat at the best of times, and it doesn't improve when people have to fulfill basic bodily functions. And if some of those functions seem worse to you when you're up in the air, it's not just your imagination.

Giggling scientists have conducted multiple studies on flying's effect on flatulence. Basically, a combination of stress, pressure, and unhealthy airport food can combine, turning you into a Voltron powered entirely by natural gas. That gives us all the appropriate scientific background for this story about a flight being rerouted by excess flatulence, but we are still left with many, many questions.

italita/Adobe StockFor instance, why didn't they just drop the oxygen masks?

Two passengers on a Transavia flight from Dubai to Amsterdam asked the man sitting next to them to stop passing so much gas. The man refused, either because he was having legitimate gastrointestinal problems or because he identifies as Chaotic Evil. The two men then appealed to flight attendants, and when that failed to resolve the situation to their satisfaction, they became what the pilot dubbed "passengers on the rampage."

Yes, a brawl apparently started over this, because humanity is both smart enough to build giant flying machines and dumb enough to get info fart-related fistfights inside of them. After warnings from the pilot to behave themselves, the flight was diverted to Vienna, and the two complainants (along with two women who claimed to be unrelated to the incident, leading to a lawsuit) were thrown off the plane and banned from flying Transavia. The flatulent man was able to continue the flight, suggesting that either the two men were massively overreacting or the situation was so bad that no one wanted to approach him.

Mark is on Twitter and wrote a book that's perfect for flight delays.

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