Flying the Unfriendly Skies
By Hank Nuwer
Stories of unruly passengers causing airline pilots to take unscheduled forced landings seem to make headlines more frequently.
We read about miscreants doing all sorts of tomfoolery and dangerous acts: storming a cockpit, opening a door in midflight, and going full-scale Sonny Liston with their fists on fellow passengers.
At the end of June 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration’s web site listed 880 reports of fools gone wild in the air. The FAA noted that 2021 was a particularly bad year. No less than 5,973 reports for bad behavior in the air were recorded that year.
Although I fly a lot, I hadn’t seen anything bad enough to make headlines. Well, there was that time in Las Vegas, Nevada, when a passenger on an overbooked Spirit flight made such a scene at the gate that an airline employee came on board offering a voucher to any passenger that would give up a seat.
Which is how, in 2014, I ended up with a free round-trip ticket to Lima, Peru.
My string of good luck changed last month on June 20. My wife Gosia and I boarded a Polish Airlines (LOT 380) at Gate A25 in Frankfort, Germany, for the short flight to Warsaw, Poland.
Gosia and I were tired. We just had had a seven-hour layover in Frankfort.
No matter, I finished most of Carl Hiassen’s new satirical novel Fever Beach, and I practiced my high school French on a Moroccan vendor selling tasty bockwurst dogs thick as Aaron Judge’s bat.
I also was happy to find that LOT still gave passengers (not addicted to cellphones) an airline magazine in Polish and English to read.
I had read the first few paragraphs of a travel story on Kazakhstan, when a big, burly man in a white tee shirt left his seat and stumbled toward the bathroom, clipping my aisle seat with his left hip.
A flight attendant asked if he needed assistance. Although the passenger clearly was from Poland, he spoke in English.
“Ish it is all right to use the bad-room?”
His slurred words let the attendant know he’d been overserved in an airport lounge.
I turned to Gosia next to me in the center seat. “Gad, he stinks like a distillery,” I said.
As the lush proceeded to the head, my attention shifted to a commotion ten aisles ahead.
A woman stood in the aisle and removed her bag from the overhead bin.
A younger female flight attendant hurried over.
“She’s demanding to be let off the plane,” the woman’s former seatmate explained in a loud voice.
“Can she do that?” Gosia asked me.
The answer, unfortunately, was yes. Off she went.
Meanwhile, the lush, having relieved himself, took his seat.
The calm voice of the captain explained that we’d be stuck in our seats for at least the next hour. “If someone doesn’t want to fly, we can’t make her,” he said.
Why an hour? The captain said that a bus had to transport the runaway passenger, and that an inspector would have to make a report.
Gosia pointed to the lush two seats ahead who now was passed out dead asleep.
“When he wakes up and finds the plane is still on the ground he’s going to throw a fit,” she predicted.
The three flight attendants hurried from seat to seat as passengers with connections to Lodz, Poland, and Israel protested the delay. The flight attendants apologized to one and all, but they explained strict airport procedures had to be followed.
“I hope the rental car agent in Warsaw will wait for us,” Gosia said.
The flight attendants, two females and a male, calmed the passengers with soothing words. Most weren’t happy about the delay, but, like us, they accepted the inevitable with minimal grumbling.
Twenty minutes later, the lush woke up. In a gruff voice that carried, he asked his seatmate why the plane wasn’t aloft.
When he heard the reason, he unleashed a string of epithets in Polish. His cussing frightened a young girl one aisle behind and over from him.
She started wailing.
The lush addressed the girl’s father. We’ll skip what he said, but you can imagine words unprintable in a family newspaper.
The mother of the girl leaped up directly behind him. A shouting match erupted. All three flight attendants tried to mollify her to no avail.
The woman demanded the man be thrown off the plane.
“Oh no,” whispered Gosia. “If that happens, they’ll need a second bus and another inspection.
“Probably our flight would have to be cancelled,” I said.
Which is exactly what one flight attendant told the woman.
But now the girl’s father flexed his big arms and confronted the lush. The lush replied with another string of curses in Polish.
Now it was the mother’s turn to turn on the tears and spittle.
“She’s hysterical,” Gosia whispered.
The flight attendants stayed calm. They ordered the man to leave his seat and go to the front for reseating.
The lush was now scared sober. He realized now he could have been evicted from the aircraft.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the little girl before taking a new seat
The crisis was over.
Five minutes later, the lead flight attendant came down the aisle to distribute cups of water.
“You’re doing a great job,” I whispered.
She thanked me and chuckled. “You’re the only person on the whole plane with a smile.
She went on to say that she had had the night off, but another attendant had cancelled.
Some 75 minutes behind schedule, the captain asked the flight attendants to prepare for departure.
I thanked the flight attendants as we left the plane. Their professionalism, and that of the captain, kept LOT 380 possibly from becoming a breaking news story on CNN.
Our car rental agent was a saint. He stayed and waited for Gosia and me. An hour’s drive later, we arrived at our remote cabin in a Polish forest.
Our vacation had begun.
Hank and Gosia Nuwer are back in Alaska after a two-week vacation in Poland and Hungary during a record-breaking heat wave in Europe. First published July 12, 2026 in the Cordova Times