21 airport employees share the craziest things that have happened at their job.

Going to the airport is a character-building experience full of pitfalls and challenges: from waiting in epic lines, to taking off your shoes while someone yells at you, to paying $97 for three snacks and a magazine. But if you think going to the airport is a wild ride, imagine what it's like to work in one.Someone asked airport employees of Reddit: "what is the strangest, funniest, scariest thing that happened at your airport?" These 20 stories will put your TSA tales to shame.1.) From magic_zipper: A little different, but I work Avionics on F-22s in the Air Force. Most of the work is done outside. One day on mid shift we get told to go inside, turn off the lights, and not look outside. Not knowing what the hell 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. 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 3 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 hell happened. 2.) From EffityJeffity: Another one, this time from my Dad. We're coming off a plane at Lagos airport, it's 1992, I'm about ten 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 ask 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 realise they'll have to cut him out. So they fire up the angle grinder, and cut a 2 foot by 2 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's 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. 3.) From DomLite: 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 it was surreal. Like something out of a David Lynch film. EDIT - To clarify, this island is tiny, but it is also very close off the coast and has a bridge to the mainland. 4.) From vivalapancakes: Worked at Perth airport until recently. Most flights in Perth go to Bali and you see some right characters (read: Bali bogans). A Jetstar flight was delayed by 7 hours and a woman and her husband used the time to get absolutely shitfaced. 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 fuck off. Cue airport police, $10,000 fine and no flight to Bali.... should have listened to the staff... 5.) From ironwolf56: Worked for a summer as a skycap at an airport in Maine. A couple of the 9/11 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 kinda 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. 6.) From AB-G: I was cabin crew doing a turnaround from Dubai, UAE to Muscat, Oman and back again. We’re on ground in Muscat and hear from ground staff to take extra care of a passenger who is about to board. She was an English lady in her fifties, as you can imagine, well turned out but unassuming all the same. But she looked completely shaken when she boarded. So what happen was, she had checked in her luggage and had gone on to security. She placed her trolly bag on the conveyor belt and she went ahed through the metal detector and was waiting on the other side for her bag. Next thing she knows she’s being detained, placed in hand cuffs 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 whats in the bag?’ , Lady: ‘Yes’ and goes about describing whats 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. Shes aghast and protests her innocence, doesn’t know anything about it. This poor lady is completely distraught. The gravity of it is hitting her and shes 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 undid the zips and slipped it in. She had no idea who this man was. So she was let go and free to continue travelling but her trolly 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! 7.) From Chupacabra_Sandwich: 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. THere's regulations and procedures for EVERYTHING all the way up to Elephants and whales and shit. Weirdest thing we ever got to actually ship was an alligator of some sort. 8.) From drinkduff77: Last year I was working as a contractor in the planning department of a large commercial airport. This airport has a park between the runways that people go to to sit and watch planes. I decide to take my two young boys out there one evening because they like to watch the planes take off and land. It starts to get dark and I see a lady stand up and put her arms up and start making a howling sound. At first I didn't know what she was doing or where the sound was coming from. I hear it again and realize it's her and she might be a little crazy. This continues for a few minutes and I decide to leave. Meanwhile she's still standing there, arms up, howling at the planes taking off. A week or so later, I had to ride around the airport with an operations guy and I tell him about my trip to the park and what happened. He says "was there a Lufthansa Airbus leaving while she was doing that?" I tell him, yeah, there was. He proceeds to tell me that she's pretty well known around there. According to him, she believes that she died on a Lufthansa flight in a previous life and has been reincarnated into her current body. She thinks her soul is still connected to the flight somehow. She goes there to pray over the same Lufthansa flight every time it departs. edit: Just remembered that I had a video of this. You can see her stand up at 0:14, she starts singing at 0:30, and the Lufthansa flight departs shortly afterwards. 9.) From Streder: Pittsburgh international, 3am or so several years ago. Watched an older woman tumble down the "up" escalator. Every time she flipped over she yelled "I'm ok" like Filburt from Rocko's Modern Life. Flop I'm ok Flop I'm ok Flop I'm ok Rolled in place for maybe a minute before someone shut the thing off. 10.) From ErrantRose: I used to periodically work security to supplement my income. In 2002 I'm assigned, for the first time, to Spirit Airlines repair facility at Meacham International Airport in Fort Worth, TX. One day I'm sitting in the guard shack with a coworker, reading a book, when a number of Fort Worth Police Department vehicles swarm the parking lot. SWAT Officers, accompanied by an impressive number of Federal Officers, locked the place down at gunpoint. My coworker and I get dragged out of the guard shack, and yes I do mean dragged, and held by law enforcement at gunpoint while they secured the facility. It turns out that Spirit hadn't been doing proper background checks on the mechanics and a number of the them were in the country illegally, using falsified documents. Many were suspected of having ties to extremist groups on the Philippines. The scuttlebutt around the office is that a C-level executive for Spirit had flown them in privately to cut payroll costs, but this was never confirmed. As if that wasn't bad enough my coworker and I were reprimanded for not calling our supervisory staff as soon as the raid occurred. You know, while we were being held at gunpoint. And for the doubters: http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/amp/28-nabbed-by-feds-at-Fort-Worth-site-2067089.php 11.) From chuchubott: 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 opened 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 occurance the security at our airport became insane. 12.) From R8RBruin: 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. 13.) From Chupacabra_Sandwich: 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 Beech 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 attatch to tow bar to the front wheel. Blood was fucking everywhere and that shit was never the same. But the scariest might not be what happens at an airport, but who works at the airport ramp at 2 am. During my 3.5 years there I worked with three seperate murderers/attempted murderers. One guy got into an argument at a local college and shot someone in a classroom. Another beat his girlfriends 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 as 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. 14.) From Flupsy: A schoolfriend’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 TITS’. She exclaimed ‘my bloody brother, I’ll kill him!’ 15.) From Sk8Chach: 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 a 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 precautions 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 dryhump the bag. This was all before 9/11 16.) From non_clever_username: Worked at a tiny little airport with puddle hopper planes. Plane landed on a really fucking 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 one was passengers were on board. Edit: because you're anal retentive Edit2: quick clarification that they landed fine because the wind was parallel with the runway. However, the taxiway they were attempting to go down was perpendicular to the wind. 60-70 mph winds + some residual ice on the taxiway = No Bueno. Tail of the plane was taking the brunt of the wind and trying to drag the rest of the plane in the ditch. Kind of looked like someone had an invisible rope attached to the tail and was trying to drag it into the ditch with a tractor or something . It was crazy. 17.) From faisent: My mom worked for British Airways for years, dealing with special freight cases for import/export. 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'd only declared them and paid for them to be shipped correctly he would have made a health profit and probably saved some lives... Edit, thanks everyone for the comments. We've learned anti-venom is another word for antivenin, that modern planes have heated cargo areas, and that Samuel L Jackson was sorely missed in a warehouse 30-odd years ago. Going to take a moment to say that you should make sure you check with your carrier if you're flying with pets (or even venomous snakes!) and make sure you do it safely. As one of the commenters posted, please don't ship your wife in a box on vacation! 18.) From BooRadley9669: I used to work for TSA 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've happened to that lady and little boy if I didn't follow my instincts. 19.) From [deleted]: 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 asshole 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 TSA 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 OK, I'll call TSA. 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 TSA 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 ask 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 lightbulb go on in his head. 20.) From [deleted]: 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 falconer 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 it's neck. Thousands of dollars worth of highly trained bird, gone. 21.) From Trauma_Mama_xx: Not me, but my sister works at the airport. Funny things: sex convention in town. Someone going through security had a dildo that has a suction cup to one side to stick on a table or other surface. TSA employee didn't realize what it was when doing a bag check and stuck the suction part on the table. They had to slide it to the edge of the table to release the suction. Scary ( I guess): Dude coming through security. His bag goes off as needing to be checked because there is something coming up like a weird metal inside of plastic. They pull out a pencil case and open it. When the agent opens it, the scorpion inside's tail shoots up. The guy won it at a scorpion fight or something. TSA employee was like "fuck this. I'm going home" Funny and scary (my personal favorite): In the security area for checked bags. Employee A asks his supervisor of the next day off to start his week or so off early. Supervisor says no because he already has a lot of time off. A is checking a bag when something pokes his hand. He tells his supervisor that there is something sharp in the bag that stabbed him. Sup thinks he's trying to make excuses to go home, but checks the bag. The sharp thing was a scorpion. Sup tells A to sit down with his hand down and calls first aid. They put the bag inside of plastic bags because they are all afraid of this scorpion. Agriculture comes after handling a situation at a different airport and puts the scorpion on ice to kill it and asks the hospital if they need it for anti-venom. Dude calls his supervisor and tells him he won't be in tomorrow or for the next like month because they had to give him so much anti-venom. Then tells his boss to call him the scorpion king. I saw a picture of the scorpion. It looked big. Also I believe this all (except the sex convention one) happened in the international terminal, but I could be wrong about that.