Unsolved disappearances, statistical impossibilities, and the strangest, funniest things that have ever happened at 35,000 feet. Some of these will unsettle you. Some will just make you laugh mid-flight.
Five Navy training aircraft vanished off the Florida coast in 1945 after radioing about broken compasses and an ocean that "didn't look right." The rescue plane sent to find them disappeared too.
Read full report →After an in-flight explosion tore JAT Flight 367 apart over Czechoslovakia in January 1972, flight attendant Vesna Vulović fell nearly six miles trapped inside a section of fuselage. She survived, and still holds the record for the highest fall survived without a parachute.
Read full report →In 1971, a man in a suit and sunglasses hijacked a 727, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted out of the rear stairs somewhere over the Pacific Northwest — and was never seen again.
Read full report →After a cabin pressurization fault incapacitated everyone aboard, an airliner continued flying on autopilot for hours — past its destination, past intercepting fighter jets — until it ran out of fuel. Investigators pieced together the chain of small errors that led to it.
Read Full Report → PDFA simple unit-conversion error left a brand-new Boeing 767 with less than half the fuel its crew believed they had — leading to a dead-stick emergency landing that became one of aviation's most famous training case studies.
Read Full Report → PDFIn 2010, JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater ended a dispute with a passenger by grabbing two beers from the cart, announcing his resignation over the PA, and sliding down the emergency evacuation chute onto the tarmac at JFK. He was arrested, but became an overnight folk hero.
Read full report →In 2018, a United Airlines passenger tried to bring an emotional support peacock named Dexter aboard a flight from Newark, despite being warned three separate times that the bird wouldn't be allowed. Gate agents turned them both away, and the story went viral worldwide.
Read full report →Fifteen minutes into a 2017 flight from Aniak to Anchorage, pilots told passengers there was a loose snake somewhere on board. A boy in the back row spotted the four-foot reptile curled under a duffel bag; a flight attendant bagged it and stowed it in an overhead bin for the rest of the trip.
Read full report →A young man walked onto an Air Canada flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver in 2010 wearing a hyper-realistic silicone mask made him look like an elderly white man. Partway through the flight he ducked into the lavatory and emerged looking decades younger — and a fellow passenger immediately alerted the crew.
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