Living the Dream: Delta Passenger Has Plane Practically to Himself
No screaming babies. No seat recliners. New York man has plane (almost) to himself (Photo: Twitter)
For fliers, it’s the best feeling in the world: when the flight attendants close the airplane doors, providing final confirmation that the two seats next to you — which had been empty when you boarded — will remain so for the duration of the flight. “I have the entire row to myself,” you say. ”This is baller.”
Yes, it is. But not nearly as baller as having the whole plane to yourself.
Chris O’Leary, who runs the beer blog Brew York, lived that dream when he showed up in Cleveland for his Delta flight home to New York and got the shocking news that he was going to be the only passenger.
“All I did was get on a plane I was booked to get on,” O’Leary tells Yahoo Travel about his famous flight, which has gotten him viral fame and a feature on ABC News. ”I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”
Ironically, O’Leary’s good flight fortune came during a day of bad flight fortune. O’Leary was originally scheduled to fly home on a 7:15 a.m. flight, but he got a text alert that it had been canceled. So he stayed in his hotel. He was re-booked on a later flight, but he kept getting alerts that that flight was delayed, too. He finally went to the airport when his flight was re-scheduled to depart at 1 p.m.
“I get to the airport and one of the gate agents said, ‘We’ve been paging you all day. We had seat for you on an earlier flight,’” O’Leary remembers. Turns out, all the other passengers on his original 7:15 a.m. flight had already been rebooked and were en route to New York.
And that’s when the gate agent put O’Leary on the next flight and gave him the good news. “The gate agent said, ‘I’d better go down and tell the crew that they’re going to have one passenger.’ Sure enough I go down and board the plane and I’m the only one there.”
O’Leary quickly tweeted the good news.
O’Leary says the flight crew got a kick out of having only one passenger on the 76-seater regional plane. “They were quite amused,” he says. O’Leary found it funny, too — especially his personalized pre-flight instructions, which were slightly less formal than usual. “During the safety demo, the flight attendant said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to say this, but if there’s an evacuation you can probably just follow us to the nearest exit.’”
Related: Questions You Shouldn’t Ask Your Flight Attendants
O’Leary’s solo flight didn’t last long. Right as the plane pushed off, it was called back to the gate so that a second passenger could board. “My dream was crushed,” O’Leary joked.
Turns out, the interloper didn’t keep O’Leary from enjoying a (mostly) empty flight. O’Leary says his fellow passenger stretched out and slept for the whole one-hour journey. O’Leary chatted with the flight attendants.
“The best thing about it is all the things we’ve come to hate about flying today weren’t present,” he says. “There was no one in front to recline their seat into my knees. There were no screaming babies on board. It was just peaceful flight.”
WATCH: Four Ways to Loosen Up While in Flight
Alas, O’Leary’s had to deal with some jealous haters. “The one thing that someone said to me that gave me a little pang of guilt was, ‘Wow! You really upped your carbon footprint today,” O’Leary laughs, noting the plane was going to New York with or without him anyway (the crew had to make their flight back to their base in St. Louis). “It had nothing to do with me being on it,” he says.
But mostly, people are congratulating O’Leary for living the dream. “Everyone thinks back to their bad experience with flying; I’ve had plenty myself,” O’Leary says. “I guess everyone dreams of having their own private jet.”
WATCH: Lucky Passenger Chris O’Leary
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