5 Stupid Flight Delays That'll Fill You With Secondhand Rage

Menzio was allowed to re-board, and the flight took off two hours late without his accuser on it. Hey, extra elbow room! Score!

Menzio noted that while everyone involved was polite to him, it was a baffling and frustrating experience with an inefficient and biased security system. We're baffled too. While high school calculus mostly taught us that we should abandon our aspirations of building a personal space shuttle, who can't tell math from a written language? If it was a code or calculation to bring the plane down, what kind of terrorist would be committed enough to agree to the mission, but lazy enough to leave all the strategizing until moments before takeoff? And what kind of terror organization would be targeting the crown jewel of potential targets that is the 41-minute hop from Philadelphia to Syracuse? Any plots would be foiled by attendants yelling at the perpetrators to sit back down, because the flight never cruises long enough to turn the seat belt sign off.

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?!"

That photo is from Anchorage, and while it's not unusual for polar bears, caribou, and musk ox to block runways there, the seal was a first, and required a special and presumably hilarious-looking intervention from animal control.

And at the other extreme from America's climate, Puerto Rico has to deal with iguanas sunning themselves on runways. The island has a problem with invasive iguanas, which are large enough that volunteers are encouraged to shoot (and eat) them by the dozen. Thanks to a lack of predators and endless foliage to consume, there are somewhere between 10 and 14 million of the scaly fuckers, and without extensive control efforts, that population would double every year until the island sank beneath the weight of a Biblical plague.

On hot summer afternoons, it's common for runways to be closed so they can be cleaned of the lizards, which can flatten tires or be sucked into engines. That means flights dealing with takeoff and landing delays. It costs $80,000 a year to keep airports iguana-free, although the government tries to offset costs by selling iguana meat, which is a hustle that LaGuardia is probably ripping off for their rats as we speak.

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.

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.

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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