There’s something about public transportation and traveling on planes that brings out some of the weirdest aspects of humankind. Passengers often run into hilarious and dramatic situations that make them wonder why their lives suddenly resemble a movie script. 

Redditor u/TheRealWhoDat started an intriguing discussion when they asked internet users to share the strangest things they’ve ever overheard while flying on a plane. And though many of these are truly funny, others are quite concerning. We’ve collected the most interesting stories for your amusement, Pandas, so scroll down and we hope you enjoy them—especially if you’re currently in an airport waiting room!

Bored Panda wanted to learn more about the appeal of eavesdropping and why it sometimes makes us feel guilty, so we reached out to social psychologist Alison Jane Martingano, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, and a blogger at Psychology Today. She was kind enough to explain to us how eavesdropping is rooted in our social nature. Read on for the insights she shared with us.

Read More: 45 Hilarious Conversations People Overheard On A Plane And Decided Were Too Good Not To Share

#1

There was this kid was behind me that kept telling her dad she lost her tooth and the dad was disgruntledly trying to find it, and some guy nearby said “hey kid, I hear if you lose your tooth on a plane, the tooth fairy gives you 50 bucks” to which the dad replied, “hey look sweetie, the tooth fairy decided to sit next to us on the plane!”

Image credits: monkeysolo69420

#2

Some guy told his partner that she didn’t need more yarn and every woman in earshot promptly told him how wrong he was.

Image credits: KittikatB

#3

I am a pilot for a major airline. Decades ago I was running for a deadhead flight home and managed to snag the last seat. A mother and young daughter were seated next to me.
Halfway through the flight the mother, seeing my disheveled look after flying all day, asked if I wanted her daughters PB&J sandwich that she wasn’t going to eat.
I politely declined, but she insisted.
That was the best Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich I’d ever had!

Image credits: Delicious_Ad8201

#4

Nervous passenger: Excuse me. How often do planes crash?

Flight Attendant: Only once!

Image credits: Ellie_Llewellyn

#5

Two older guys in my row on the way to an academic conference. One of them mentions that the first thing he is doing is attending lecture on some esoteric physics topic, but before he can even finish the name of the topic, guy #2 says “oh, of course: The Effects of co-limited tesseracts on quantum membrane string interactions (or somesuch physics jargon.) Are you familiar with the topic?” Guy #1 gets half way through saying “well actually I-” before he is cut off by guy #2 who says “Because, you see, most people, even in the field are woefully undereducated in this particular subject…” and then proceeds to talk guy #1’s head off for about ten minutes. Guy #1 just nots and smiles patiently through the whole exchange. At the end of his missive, guy #2 says “So, the lecture is being given by Dr. So-and-So, one of the leaders in the field, and absolute legend. Do you know his work?” And, of course, guy #1 puts on a very kind but somewhat sheepish look and says “Actually, I am Professor So-and-So: your understanding of the field is actually quite good!” Guy #2 turns red as a tomato for a few seconds but seemed to get over it quickly and they spent the rest of the flight casually talking shop about theoretical physics.

Image credits: StyrkeSkalVandre

#6

Not so much what he said, but I sat next to this fully grown man that was playing plants vs zombies the whole 3 hour flight with incredible enthusiasm. Everytime a plant got eaten or he killed a difficult zombie he’d jump in his seat, pump his fist and aggressively whisper yeerrsss, YEERRSSS, gert em yessss….

Image credits: DeousPascitCorvos

#7

Flying domestic US. Two oldish ladies spent the whole flight talking about how ugly my husband is, in French. I guess they assumed no one could speak it. We can.

Image credits: SlashingSimone

#8

A 5 year old boy once said “Dad, can you ask them to pull over so I can go to the toilet?”. Haha

Image credits: RonnyLuvsU

#9

Way too late for anyone to see this and it wasn’t so much overheard as said to me:

I was flying alone and this little girl (maybe 5) wandered down the aisle and said hello.

I asked where her parents were and she said they died and a police officer was flying with her to take her to her aunt. My brain was not able to conjure any response at all apart from ” errr…. sorry” she asked if she could look out my window so I moved over to the aisle seat and let her, me continuously looking for a cop that she might be travelling with.

She then told me how her parents were driving back from a party last week and their car got pushed off the road by a truck into a tree. She was quietly crying while telling me this story. Suddenly I hear “oh there you are” from the aisle. There’s a woman standing there.

The girl says “hello mommy” and leaves with her.

Image credits: Soopercow

#10

“I’ve told you many times Brenda, I am not shaving my balls! It’s my balls and I’m a man!”

Image credits: EngineeringVirgin

#11

This isn’t “crazy” but its definitely the most fun I’ve had on a plane:

This guy introduced himself as “Caribbean Boy,” chatted with nearly everyone on the plane, asked them what their plans were, complimented everyone, then started singing (Bob Marley type stuff). He had most of the passengers clapping along, everyone was smiling. Most charismatic man I ever met.

Image credits: jdmillar86

#12

On a flight from Honolulu to LA, I hear a woman say, “Why are there so many white people on this plane?”

Image credits: Poultrygeist74

#13

Hour long plane trip from Dothan Alabama to Atlanta. Sat in front of 2 guys arguing the validity of demon possession. One believed that it wasn’t a possession per se, but merely the devil interfering with your thoughts. The other believed it was an actual demon possession, and he knew people that did exorcisms which solved the problem. It was a fascinating philosophical discussion. I was entertained for the full hour.

The world is different down south.

Image credits: nick717

#14

Two mormon missionaries trying to convert the sweet, naive man sitting between them the entire flight.

Image credits: floweringsouls

#15

Pilot accidentally left the intercom switch on. The whole plane heard him say “Ooo. That’s weird”. Nothing else. Plane took off amid varying levels of anxiety throughout the cabin. I’m here to tell the tale today, so thankfully it wasn’t too weird!

Image credits: Traffodil

#16

“There’s a bomb on the plane, it’s going to go off at (insert time here)”

(as the time he said approached)

“Ten, nine, eight…”

The police were waiting for him when we got there.

Image credits: RummazKnowsBest

#17

When i was 16 i was taking a flight from Oslo to Stockholm, around 45 minutes. Before lift off, the guy in front of me( around 30 years old) broke up with his gf who sat next to me……. They yelled so much and loudly during that flight I had the worst head ache when we landed. Why not just wait 45 minutes?

Edit: Wow, 1k upvotes. Thank you 😊

Image credits: Panzerpython

#18

Once I was flying between two Australian cities, and there were a bunch of highly manicured young men sitting in front of me. They looked somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t place them. Naturally, I spent the entire flight trying to figure out who they were, mostly by looking between the seats while they were texting their friends.

I saw them write a bunch of messages to mates about how much “they didn’t want to hang out with us” and “they just spend all their time in their rooms”.

It wasn’t until we landed and I walked out into a room of screaming teenage girls – signs and selfies at the ready, that I placed that we’d been sitting directly behind Five Seconds of Summer – an Australian boy band which was reaching popularity at the time. I can only assume they were texting about the band they were touring with – a little known outfit called One Direction.

Image credits: MongooseBrigadier

#19

My competitor’s entire sales plan for a prospect I was on my way to visit. Definitely helped my pitch.

Image credits: HavingNotAttained

#20

passenger 1 – i cant wait to get there, this party is gonna be insane

passenger 2 – did you hear, jose’s estranged wife is gonna be there

passenger 1 – why is she estranged?

passenger 2 – because shes strange, and hes mexican

Image credits: AgentLead_TTV

#21

“We aren’t cleared to taxi at the moment. We should be taking off within an hour.”

Image credits: UpToNoGood140

#22

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been facing some strong headwinds and… it appears we burned up a *little* more fuel than we anticipated so we will be making a diversion to Fiji.”

This was flying from the US to Australia in a 747. I had seen on the trip map that we had been flying in the wrong direction for like 2+ hours. When we did land we landed hard and they told us that because of the landing we had to sit on the ground with the engines off in Fiji in the summer while technicians looked at the plane.

When we were airborne again, our destination was fogged out and we diverted from Sydney to Melbourne. I don’t ever want to spend 26 hours on a plane again.

Image credits: thrax_mador

#23

A guy coming home early to bust a cheating wife. He was on the phone with a friend/family who told him the other guy was at his house abd they didn’t expect him back until the next week.

Image credits: mauore11

#24

I was sitting next to a father with his small child. The child wouldn’t stop hopping around, until the father said “sit still and be a good boy or the plane will crash because of you and we will end up dying.”
Never seen a kid so quiet before.

Image credits: Alternative-Yak-8657

#25

I was sat next to a teenage boy and his dad. The kid was telling his dad how much he loved the song “sexual healing” by Marvin Gaye, when the kid was finally done talking the dad just looked at him and said “you’re a virgin”

Image credits: itsrae2you

#26

“He’s 17!” – my dad, to the flight attendant who was about to serve me a Jack & Coke instead of the Coke I had asked for. Killjoy.

Image credits: ZormkidFrobozz

#27

Ohh. I got this one…

Passenger W is struggling to get his luggage into the overhead compartment and passenger E seated next to me starts getting upset. W’s carry-on clearly doesn’t fit.

E speaks up saying to be careful because his luggage is there. Flight attendant comes over and says passenger W needs to check his bag. W grows increasingly disturbed, but it works out.

Then W says to the flight attendant “I’m sorry, it’s just that I haven’t taken my medication. I get so nervous with all these body bags on board. You know I have body parts in my luggage.”

Passenger E turns to me and says, “did you hear that? I just have a laptop in my luggage!”

Image credits: clever_whitty_name

#28

I overheard a passenger passionately arguing with their seatmate about the correct way to eat a slice of pizza with chopsticks.

Image credits: zaramarley07

#29

Sat next to a college guy once who , while drinking some alcoholic beverages, started crying and telling me he killed his best friend in a drunk driving accident. Because he had good lawyers he got off wo jail time. He was sobbing and drinking. When we landed I made sure he was NOT driving.

Image credits: MarleneFrancais

#30

A small child once told me that she had to fix the plane by lifting the armrest up and down. She also called me a dog-headed boy girl.

Roasted.

Image credits: Prag-O-Matic

#31

I was sitting next to a dad and his daughter who was about 5. He was super cool and was chatting away while his daughter started talking to me. She was so sweet and bubbly. And gave wayyy to much information to me. She said something along the lines of ” I went to my grandma and grandpas house and they’re married, I wish my dad would marry my mom but they can’t talk to each other but I always wish they were married like my grandma and grandpa.” Her dad would have been horrified. And I was just sad.

Image credits: lpcoolj1

#32

“Yo, are those snakes OK back there?”

Image credits: Damolisher2

#33

Before takeoff, after the doors were closed, a kid of about 6/7 yrs old towards the front of the plane stood up on his seat, faced the rest of the plane and yelled “we’re all gonna dieee” while his parents tried to pull him back down.

Image credits: leafygirl

#34

The absolute mayhem that broke out when the captain announced that we were in fact not gonna get to take off because of night air traffic restrictions at our destination after we had been sitting and waiting in the aircraft for 2 hours already…
That entire evening was just a great mess, first we had to wait for a flight attendant who was called from stand by, then we finally got to board the plane, but apparently the airline had a severe ground staff shortage so there was no one to get the luggage onto the plane, when the luggage was there we didn’t have a tow, then the captain told us we wouldn’t get landing clearance at our destination but that we couldn’t deplane either, because, well, ground staff shortage, and the only guy who was allowed to attach the jetbridge was busy with other planes, so we sat there for another 2 hours, absolute horror for the flight attendants, cause people were raging and didn’t understand that the airline employees pn the plane had nothing to do with rescheduling/ compensation/ or the reasons for this mess in general…
I actually kinda enjoyed the whole thing, turned out to become a little adventure, I got to transfer to another airport in the city, spent the night there and flew out with a better airline the next morning, paid by the original airline + cancellation compensation, but man poor flight attendants

Image credits: 2hahahha2

#35

I was on a flight and happen to glance over and see the phone of the guy sitting next to me. He was scrolling tik tok and watched some clip of a girl dancing in revealing clothing. I’m not even convinced the girl in the video was of age, but anyways, this like 50 year old dude just comments “Yummy!” and then keeps scrolling.

Image credits: W_4ca

#36

A tragic airplane moment: we’ve been sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off for two hours. The guy in front of us fell asleep immediately upon boarding, he just woke up and started getting ready to get off the plane – he thought we’d landed. My wife broke the news to him.

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Image credits: tomgara