Airport Staff, What's the Funniest Thing That Happened at Work?

airport employees of reddit what is the strangest funniest scariest thing that happened at your airport a little different but i work avionics on f-22s in the air force most of the work is done outside one day on midshift we get told to go inside turn off the lights and not look outside not knowing what the heck was going on we obviously complied once everyone was inside the big stadium lights that covered the entire airfield were turned off and all the entire airfield was dark but we heard low rumbling in the distance that was getting closer and rumors started flying we were under attack aliens you name it eventually we could hear three large planes fly very low overhead and be gone after 15 more minutes we were given the go-ahead to go back outside and back to work to this day i still don't know what the heck happened i would assume that it was a classified prototype they didn't want seen another one this time from my dad we're coming off a plane at lagos airport it's 1992. i'm about 10 years old so i wander around the baggage hall and find in a secluded corner a service lift with a bloody great hole cut out of the door it's cordoned off so you can't use it i asked my dad about it a cleaner had been using the service lift one night after a shift to go back up to the departure area where he could stash his trolley etc lift breaks down between floors the emergency help button does nothing this is nigeria remember and of course it's way before mobile phones were even introduced he pounds and pounds on the interior of the lift but it's in a quiet bit of the airport where no one goes he's not scheduled to be on shift the next day his colleagues come in and assume the trolley has been stolen as the cupboard is open and it's not there they carry on when they try to use the service lift it doesn't work they don't hear their colleague as he's trapped closer to the floor below than the one above trapped cleaner has now been in there 18 hours or so he's desperate he drinks the water from the mop bucket still pounding on the lift hoping someone will come 24 hours pass his family come to the airport to find out where he is their village has no telephone at least not one that works colleagues haven't seen him maybe he's gone into the city to spend his paycheck given to him that morning eventually it's been nearly 48 hours trapped man is feeling sick from drinking mop bucket water he's had to use another bucket as a toilet the smell is unbearable a technician arrives to try to fix the broken lift he's saved or not the tech manages to get the lift back down to the ground floor but the doors won't open they try prying jimmying nothing's budging them they even removed the motors and tried by hand eventually they realized they'll have to cut him out so they fire up the angle grinder and cut a two foot by two foot hole in the door sparks flying everywhere that's just the outer skin they can't get the angle grinder in further to the inner door welding torch comes out gas axe or whatever you want to call it of course this is flinging hot metal into the lift the cleaner is absolutely scared shitless he has been in the dark for 48 hours and now someone is flinging hot metal at him eventually they make a hole all the way through he crawls out collapses and is taken away in an ambulance he survived but does not return to his job at the airport the broken lift was still there until we left in 1995. when i returned on business in 2001 it had been repaired i still think about the poor guy whenever i get in a lift that is one heck of a story i cannot imagine being stuck for 48 hours in a lift and being so desperate that i am drinking the freaking mop water to survive feel better from thirst not an employee but a passenger i got flagged for a random tar pad down and the agent asked me if i had any metal in my body to which i said i have an iud the agent freaks out and starts flagging other agents over she musters all her calm and says please repeat that you have an ied on you to which i had to say no an iud a copper intrauterine device for birth control she didn't know what an iud was i bet you'll remember now not nearly as funny but similar misunderstanding of iud grandmother you better start taking birth control if you don't want to get pregnant me well i probably shouldn't tell you this but i got an iud grandmother shakes head unbelievable drinking and driving i work at my local airport i live on a tiny island and this airport is smaller than our library and just last summer we had a hurricane looming down on us everyone is getting packed up to evacuate we're renting cars like crazy to people fleeing and we're trying to get them out of the storm area i was out checking on the cars we had and when i walked back up there was a man sitting on a bench out front with an apocalyptic looking storm bearing down on us wind whipping everywhere just soulfully playing the trombone no idea where he came from or what he was doing but he was surreal like something out of a david lynch film i'm pretty sure he was just doing his job worked at perth airport until recently most flights in perth go to bolly and you see some right characters read bolly bogans a jet star flight was delayed by seven hours and the woman and her husband used the time to get absolutely s-faced the woman fancied a cigarette and rather than go outside and go through security again lit up in the middle of the duty free my colleagues quickly tried to stop her but she told them to frick off q airport police ten thousand dollars fine and no flight to bolly should have listened to the staff worked for a summer as a sky cap at an airport in maine a couple of the 911 hijackers came through that airport and then to logan in boston which is where the hijacking took place they chose this airport in portland precisely because it was kind of podunk and no one would pay attention as much a guy i worked with actually showed them to where the rental car place was because the way the airport was set up back then it was in this weird corner and people would ask for our help to find it constantly poor guy felt like he was in some way responsible i'll bet a thousand people who interacted even just a little bit with the hijackers felt like they were in some way responsible i was cabin crew doing a turnaround from dubai uae to muscat oman and back again we're on ground in muscat and here from ground staff to take extra care of a passenger who is about to board she was an english lady in her 50s as you can imagine well turned out but i'm assuming all the same but she looked completely shaken when she boarded so what happened was she had checked in her luggage and had gone on to security she placed her trolley bag on the conveyor belt and she went ahead through the metal detector and was waiting on the other side for her bag next thing she knows she's being detained placed in handcuffs and taken to a room for questioning they take in her bag and start questioning her airport police officer did you pack this bag yourself lady yes airport police so you know what's in the bag lady yes and goes about describing what's in the bag the questioning goes on for a while and is quite aggressive the police officer then opens up the bag and right on top of everything is this parcel filled with marijuana sighs and protests her innocence doesn't know anything about it this poor lady is completely distraught the gravity of it is hitting her and she's inconsolable drugs trafficking anywhere is a big no-no but in middle eastern countries it can end up giving you the death penalty the officers reviewed the footage of when her bag was scanned and when she placed her bag on the belt and turned away a man standing right behind her in seconds under the zips and slipped it in she had no idea who this man was so she was let go and free to continue traveling but her trolley bag was confiscated as evidence she wasn't too worried about the bag at that stage i got her a very big brandy lesson to be learned is to not let your bags out of your sight even for a second i used to do cargo for delta and british airways we ship a lot of dead people a lot of animals too they actually sent me to la to go to a class entirely on animal handling he hears regulations and procedures for everything all the way up to elephants and whales and crap weirdest thing we ever got to actually ship was an alligator of some sort a whale on an airplane flying pittsburgh international 3 a.m or so several years ago watched an older woman tumble down the up escalator every time she flipped over she yelled i'm okay like phil but from rocco's modern life flop i'm okay flop i'm okay flop i'm okay rolled in place for maybe a minute before someone shut the thing off that sounds hilariously painful i worked at a corporate aircraft maintenance place and we had a situation where this crazy woman somehow got out on the secured ramp area by the time one of our line service guys saw her she had the main entry door open up on a global xrs aircraft when he pulled up she looked at him and asked if he could help her get her bags onboard when he told her he couldn't she told him she was going to fly the plane to china and didn't want to be late after that occurrence the security at our airport became insane i have so many questions not me but my father was regional manager of one of the rental car companies at the airport and on 9 11 when all flights were grounded everyone needed rental cars and it was havoc my father said the phone rang and he almost didn't answer because he was so busy turns out it was the company ceo and ordered him to hand out keys free no cost no documentation as the situation was severe and all other major rental companies followed suit not necessarily strange funny or scary but it is one of the few stories he told me about the job as a kid that i always remember one of my uncles was in the air on 9 11. he said they made an emergency landing in dallas and while everyone else stopped to call their family he sprinted for the rental car and got one of the last ones i used to work on the ramp for ups and we had a couple incidents in my time one of our small aircraft was on approach and had an issue with his hydraulics the pilot turned off his automatic systems to fix the issue manually with no warning to tell him otherwise he landed the plane without landing gear told this story before but we used to ship crates of bees in our system a box broke loose mid-flight in a beach 99 the pilot had to declare a state of emergency take the plane as high as it could go to subdue the bees and then land as quickly as he possibly could we had an employee mangle his hand trying to attach to towbar to the front wheel blood was freaking everywhere and that crap was never the same but the scariest might not be what happens at an airport but who works at the airport ramp at 2 a.m during my 3.5 years there i worked with three separate murderers attempted murderers one guy got into an argument at a local college and shot someone in a classroom another beat his girlfriend's three-year-old daughter to death he's currently on arizona death row and most heart-wrenching for me one of my friends a dude who i was super cool with and i thought of a super nice was involved in a robbery that went south his partner ended up stabbing the woman they were trying to get money from then the two of them went on the run and his partner murdered him before killing himself it was a dark time a school friend's father worked on passport control at gatwick in the mid-80s in those days passports were often handwritten and had spaces for things like distinguishing features one day a young woman presented her passport to him and he opened it and compared the photo and then paused before saying this is a bit unusual he showed her the open passport which read in part distinguishing features big t she exclaimed my bloody brother i'll kill him lol that's pretty funny wait what not an employee dad ran a business in missouri and hired a mechanic who ended up being horrible left his tools everywhere trucks he worked on would break down everything was covered in oily fingerprints etc employee was fired and forgotten fast forward a few years my parents are on their honeymoon and kanken getting on the plane to come back home when the pilot announces over the pa system that the plane can't take off for a while because of maintenance my dad looks out the window of the wing and sees oily fingerprints and tools all over the wing and the ground his old mechanic walks out from under the wing and begins working under a panel on the wing dad gets super worried and wants off the plane immediately not me but a friend he used to work refueling planes most days during lunch he would sit in the airport and do some people watching anyway a cart with a bunch of baggage rolls by and the bag on the end falls off without anyone noticing but him after some time security is notified of the unknown bag taking all precaution security bring in the bomb sniffing dog to check it out the dog sniffs it for a second and then all of a sudden begins to drill hump the bag this was all before 9 11. worked at a tiny little airport with puddle hopper planes plane landed on a really freaking windy day in the winter so there was still some ice on the ground i went out to flag the plane in and watched incredulously as the wind blew the entire plane sideways toward the ditch next to the taxiway the pilot had to do some serious engine revving to keep the plane from going into the ditch kind of funny and a little scary luckily no passengers were on board i imagine this is more common especially with little cessnas than we want to think my mom worked for british airways for years dealing with special freight cases for imported sport much of this freight was offloaded and put in a holding warehouse for customers to collect it wasn't your typical suitcases and luggage of traveling passengers one shipment came in from africa a large wooden crate that didn't actually weigh very much her client came in opened the crate to check the contents and immediately became hugely irate to the warehouse staff he barges into her office holding a frozen venomous snake she said it looked like a jagged lightning bolt all zigs and zags he's screaming at her in the office gesturing wildly with this dead snake demanding compensation in the hundreds of thousands of dollars turns out he didn't declare them as animals probably to get around any customs laws there were dozens if not hundreds of various venomous snakes in the crate the cargo area of most planes isn't heated so the poor snakes had frozen literally to death in transit he couldn't sue and had to answer some interesting questions from the treasury department once all was said and done the sucky thing is he was importing them to make anti-venom if he only declared them and paid for them to be shipped correctly he would have made a health profit and probably saved some lives i used to work for tsar and intercepted a human trafficking situation there was a guy and a lady and a little boy but the lady wasn't allowed to speak the little boy looked scared but didn't say anything he wouldn't even look at me so it freaked me out i told my supervisor and she called the airport pd as soon as he saw me go talk to my supervisor he looked sort of agitated he sent the lady and the little boy down the terminal and he was trying to grab all of their things to go meet them the police showed up and asked me for a description since the airport wasn't big he found them and brought them back to the checkpoint as they got closer to the checkpoint he tried to send the lady to the exit instead of having her come back to the checkpoint eventually the police was able to separate the man from the lady and the little boy she told them everything they walked the man out in cuffs i didn't get to see what happened to her because my shift was ending but when i grabbed my stuff from the back we made eye contact and she nodded at me i took that as a thank you it was a scary situation but i'd do it again any day there's no telling what would have happened to that lady and little boy if i didn't follow my instincts edit firstly thank you for the gold kind stranger second i did not expect this to blow up like this this happened at rick about six years ago i kind of hope the lady that was involved sees this and knows i think about her often that woman is going to remember you forever a grown woman fell asleep while waiting for her flight to board they called her name several times this was a small airport so it was quiet and she was in the area she just slept through it she woke up and realized it after the gate agent had already pulled back the ramp and the plane was backing up to begin its taxi she was screaming at the top of her lungs cursing crying and then go on her phone with her mommy and kept screaming that her mom had to do something for her because the butthole ticketing agent wouldn't let her on the flight again this is a grown woman she ended up running into the airport bathroom in full hysterics and had to be dragged out by half a dozen sir employees not as weird but still funny to me a guy came to tell me that someone had left their luggage in the boarding area there's constantly an announcement about telling someone if they see abandoned luggage or something suspicious i tell him okay i'll call tsar he's clearly freaking out and going on about how there's probably a bomb in the bag i calm him down and he goes back to his seat about 10 minutes later i go over to him with the tsar agent and ask him where is the bag he points to a bag right next to him and starts rambling again about how there's probably a bomb in it etc so i just asked him if you're so sure there's a bomb in the bag why are you sitting right next to it you could just see the light bulb go on in his head airports employ falconers the birds are used to keep other birds away from aircraft because a bird in an engine can really mess up someone's day so this foreca had come into the airport with his bird to grab a cup of coffee he decided to try to impress some ladies by taking the hawks hood off and doing a little demonstration what he failed to notice was the starlings resting outside on a steel beam hawk flew after starlings smoked the glass and broke its neck thousands of dollars worth of highly trained bird gone he killed his wingmen i was not an airport employee but was shadowing employees as part of a pilot training program one of our rotations was to spend a few days with the fire department not much action fortunately but the fire station was in the middle of the airfield so the view was epic the virginia national guard operated f-16s from the airport at the time they would go out three jets a time and would land one two three in quick succession i was in the fire station when three f-16s were on short final to land the tower asked a biz jet to hold short of their arrival runway the biz jet either didn't hear or misunderstood and rolled out onto the runway the tower told the f-16s to go around the lead jet banked a hard left followed by the number two jet bit number three kept coming gear down landing light on the tower called to the number three jet to go around and radios are encrypted so we could only hear the tower talking not the f-16 the number three jet was still coming the biz jet had nowhere to go when the firefighters started getting antsy the number three f-16 flew directly over the top of the biz jet simultaneously pulled up his gear and hit the afterburner barreled half the length of the runway then pulled up hard left to join his buddies the f-16 probably cleared the biz jet by 100 feet but it seemed a lot closer to us in the fire station and i'm sure even closer to the not this jet pilot the firefighters found it hilarious i can just see the f-16 pilot muttering he gone learn today as he gets closer and closer my time to shine most of the airport work is mundane but you will get the odd passenger that leaves an impression on you there was a group of people coming through for a business trip and their boss had never flown before one of his employees came in and explained they told him he needed dental records for tsar and wanted us to play along so the boss comes in and hands me his id and an x-ray from his dentist to check in for his flight trying not to laugh i show it to my co-worker who points at it and says weltsar might have an issue with that dude's face went white as a sheet until his employees busted up laughing he got super red in the face and eventually started laughing at himself never let it be said that airports are humorous places this thread is so full of good stories but yours i think is the best a 767 from our neighbors here on the ramp took a turn too sharp on the taxiway in winter and got stuck in the snow mud it was stuck there for 36 hours while they brought in their axe guys from their main hub to try and get it out meanwhile 80 000 plus lbs of amazon orders and other stuff important enough to burn jet fuel to move just had to sit i can't imagine what it cost them to recover it all in the plane como i can't imagine what it cost aviation in a nutshell if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: Updoot Studios

Views: 20,666

Rating: 4.9362831 out of 5

Keywords: strangest, funniest, scariest thing, airport, airport security, airport security funny, funny airport

Id: 6VpwcbIXhSc

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020