10 Craziest Reasons for Emergency Airplane Landings
6 In a weird turn of events, a Whitney Houston impersonator made a flight from Los Angeles to New York perform an emergency landing as the crew and fellow passengers could no longer take the female passenger singing the famous singerâs song, I Will Always Love You.
This emergency landing is one of the most bizarre landings ever heard. The flight had to descend due to a “very unruly passenger.” The flight from LA to New York had to divert to Kansas City as this one passenger refused to stop singing the cover of Dolly Parton’s song released in 1992.
The crew and passengers could take no more and caused the pilot to decide to kick her off the flight after an emergency landing in Kansas City. A federal air marshall who was traveling in the same flight subdued and cuffed her.Â
She was refused to reboard the flight. She was taken off and interviewed by the authorities. The plane refueled and reached its original destination with less than an hour delay.
Such disruption in a flight, even though it sounds weird, is a common occurrence and is grounds for them to be detained by the police for wasting the fellow passengers’ time and peace of mind. (Source)
7 A boy flying from New York to Louisville had a prayer box which raised suspicion during the flight. A Tefillin, a black box with verses from Torah, lead to this emergency unscheduled landing in Philadelphia after questioning the boy about the box and not receiving a proper answer.Â
A Jewish teenager carrying a religious box made some fellow passengers nervous as the content was unknown. The plane diverted to Philadelphia immediately. The emergency response mode was followed in the airport but turned out it was just a cultural misunderstanding. The kid was carrying a Tefillin that goes around his head and arm.Â
The crew also found the box so peculiar that they informed the pilot even though the kid explained it is for morning prayers. They were not ready to take any chances and landed. Except for the teen, the rest of the 18 passengers were evacuated.
A bomb squad, TSI, and FBI swarmed in and checked the plane. Quickly, they figured out it was nothing, and it was a major misunderstanding. The teen and his younger sister were crying and so distraught by the turn of events when they were only intending to visit their grandmother. (Source)
8 A fight caused a flight from Newark to Denver to land unscheduled in Chicagoâs OâHare International Airport as a man seated in 12B used a Knee Defender to stop the passenger in front of him from reclining her seat while he uses his laptop. After refusing to cooperate when the crew asked, the women in 11B stood up and threw water in his face.Â
Cops were called over this reclining-seat fight in the Newark to Denver flight. When the passenger was denied the reclining of her seat by the Knee Defender used by the other passenger, things got heated and an emergency landing was required.Â
Knee Defender is a $21 gadget used for preventing the person in front of you from reclining. It is up to airlines to have rules on such gadgets as directed by the Federal Aviation Administration.
They were met by the police, and they deemed it a customer service issue, and the TSA did not release the names to the media. The plane left without either of the passengers after an hour and 38-minute delay. (Source)
9 A bee caused a flight from Southampton to Dublin to turn back and land as the pilot suspected a technical issue. The bee was caught with a bunch of items of instrumentation and didnât survive the ordeal when the engineers found it while searching for the origin of the technical issue.Â
A Flybe airline plane was forced to return after a bee got lodged inside the flight instruments making pilots believe that there is a technical issue until they found out it was a bee that was causing the technical problem.
This is not the first time insects had been a problem. Last year in a similar incident, a swarm of flies clouded the windows of the cockpit and got sucked into aircraft engines that caused a major problem. The aircraft landed with a burning smell.
Once in 1996, a Boeing 757 carrying almost 189 people crashed when the pilots discovered the cockpit had a wasp nest. (Source)Â
10 In 2017, a flight was forced to land when a woman used the thumb of her sleeping husband to unlock his phone to find out that he had been cheating on her.Â
A Qatar Airways flight was forced to land after a wife discovered details about her husband’s infidelities in mid-flight. She was reportedly creating “such a ruckusâ” as the couple and their kid were flying to Bali for a holiday.
The woman hit her husband repeatedly, and the captain was forced to land in Chennai, India. The family was detained and as they had no Indian Visa, and deported to Kuala Lumpur.Â
The crew failed to calm the wife who was an Iranian national. They declined to reveal any further information about the unruly passenger. (Source)Â