It's hard to believe, but there was a time before we could check our email or play Candy Crush at 35,000 feet. Thankfully, those days are gone. Now we're free to check Facebook or watch our favorite TV shows mid-flight, which makes red eyes and turbulence a lot easier to deal with. And our increasingly plugged-in flights have another benefit: we can now share our experiences, in real time, with those on the ground. Airplanes, meet the live-tweet.
In 2015, there was no shortage of people taking to social media to share their travel stories. While most of them involved just another delayed flight or lost bag, some were truly exceptional — they made us laugh, gasp, and even restored our faith in humanity. Click through to see six of our favorite mid-flight social media moments from the past year.
It's 2015: Women should be able to breastfeed wherever or whenever they need to. But apparently, some airlines didn't get the memo. When new mom Molly Guy boarded a six-hour flight from NYC to Oakland, she knew she would have to pump at least twice. Doing it in her seat would prove difficult, and she didn't want to disturb her seatmates, so she asked a flight attendant if she could pump in one of the pit seats in the back of the plane for privacy. Instead, the attendant told her she'd have to pump in the tiny airplane bathroom for the "comfortability" of the other passengers.
Rather than take the injustice lying down, Guy took to Instagram mid-flight to voice her frustration. "Have you ever tried hand expressing eight ounces of breast milk crouched in an airplane bathroom with a line of passengers outside the door? #notfun," she wrote. The post was quickly picked up by the media, and JetBlue ultimately apologized to Guy for the mishap.
Photo: via @stonefoxbride.
When these two men boarded their RyanAir flight to Galway, they were complete strangers. But the resemblance between them was so striking that even other passengers were amused, prompting them to take this selfie (which was posted on Twitter by a friend of one of the men). The tweet was RT'd more than 23,000 times, and received global media coverage. Even weirder? It turned out that the two were staying at the same hotel.
Photo: via @leebeattie.
Usually the problem on a flight is screaming babies, not adults. That wasn't the case on Kelly Keegs' flight back in August, where a couple's very loud breakup across the aisle provided some major entertainment. Keegs tweeted their dialogue from the beginning ("is this really a surprise? Are you seriously surprised at this information?") to the middle ("'I'm going to ask Charlotte. I'm going to ask her the minute we get home and we'll see if your STORIES MATCH," to which Keegs added, "Omg... who's Charlotte?") to the end (a weird make up and make out sesh).
The whole saga, sobbing and pictures included, was enough to get #PlaneBreakup to start trending on Twitter.
Photo: via @keegs141.When a Canadian veterinary clinic uploaded a video of a WestJet flight attendant having fun with the safety routine on a flight over the summer, it quickly went viral. The flight attendant, Michael McAdam, has received online adulation from travelers in the past, but this was certainly his breakout role, with the original Facebook video garnering nine million views to date.
We can't help but think we'd pay much closer attention to the safety demonstrations if more flight attendants were this funny.
Back in September, Rebekka Garvison was flying from Chicago to Atlanta with her daughter Rylee to surprise her husband. She knew that flying alone with an infant would be stressful, but she didn't realize how stressful until Rylee started crying — and wouldn't stop.
That's when a fellow passenger offered to try calming the baby. Desperate, Garvison agreed. It worked, and the woman continued to hold Rylee for the remainder of the flight, even helping mother and daughter off the plane when they landed. Garvison recounted the incident on Facebook, thanking the woman, Nyfesha Miller, by name. "It brought tears to my eyes while I sat there and watched you and Rylee sleeping next to me," Garvison wrote in her moving post.
Photo: via Rebekka Garvison.
It turns out there may be a silver lining to having your flight delayed, after all. Brooklynite Chris O'Leary's flight from Cleveland to LaGuardia was repeatedly postponed last January, but after hours, he was finally issued a new ticket — only to learn that every other passenger had been rebooked on another flight, and he'd be the only passenger on his plane.
When he realized he'd be flying solo, quite literally, O'Leary took to Twitter to share his joy. Unfortunately, he was eventually joined by one other passenger, but his nearly private flight is the stuff of our travel dreams.
Photo: via @ohhleary.Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
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