Confessions of Flight Attendants: the Worst People on the Plane

For elementary school teachers, dealing with selfishness, entitled brats and just plain rude behavior is part of the job. Same thing with flight attendants. But at least elementary school teachers are dealing with children who, hopefully, will one day grow out of their bad behavior; flight attendants sometimes have to deal with adults who never improve.

Take what happened this past Sunday. A Southwest Airlines passenger allegedly thought an acceptable response to the woman in front of him reclining her seat was to try to choke her, forcing an emergency landing (no one has been charged in the incident).

“Bad behavior is a common occurrence nowadays,” Southwest flight attendant Emily Witkop tells Yahoo Travel. “I swear people leave their common sense and good judgement at home or lose it at security when they decide to travel."

Some of Yahoo Travel’s favorite flight attendants shared with us their tales of passengers behaving badly. If you exhibit these bad behaviors on a flight, you might not get a time-out or detention like you did in elementary school. But you just might get the in-flight equivalent: a one-way ticket off the airplane.