Idiot Tries to Open Airplane Emergency Door Mid-flight Because He Thought it was the Toilet

Source – An Indian passenger sparked panic in mid-air when he tried to open a plane door, apparently mistaking it for the toilet, the airline and reports said.

The man was travelling on a GoAir flight from New Delhi to Patna on Saturday when he attempted to open the aircraft’s rear exit, the carrier said.

“A co-passenger raised the alarm and he was intercepted by the crew,” GoAir said in a statement emailed to AFP on Tuesday.

Indian media reports said he was a first time flier in his late 20s.

When fellow passengers asked him what he was doing he told them he “needed to use the washroom urgently and kept tugging at the exit door”, The Telegraph, a Kolkata-based newspaper, quoted an airport official as saying.

“Pandemonium prevailed amid all this and he was restrained and finally handed over to us.

“He said that the confusion happened because he had boarded a flight for the first time in his life,” Mohammad Sanowar Khan told the newspaper.

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I live each day confident in the belief that this is the greatest time to be alive, ever. We have no giant plagues. No massive wars ravaging Europe. We’ve got the whole agriculture thing figured out so famines are rare. We live in a world of cancer treatments, prenatal ultrasounds and MRIs. Where the air is cleaner and the cars safer than they used to be. And where everyone has a device in their pocket that can not only access all the knowledge in human history, but where you can watch any episode of The Office while sitting on the toilet. Relative to all the generations that came before, we are riding a gravy train with biscuit wheels.

With one exception. Air travel. Flying in planes is the one aspect of our lives that gets worse with each passing year.

Consider this ratbag ignoramus. Do you think for one second that say, 20 years ago, we were ever in danger of seeing hundreds of passengers sucked out into the ionosphere because someone pulled the wrong door trying to pee? Not a chance. And don’t give me this “first time on a plane” claptrap either, because you don’t have to be an aeronautical engineer to know the curved door on the fuselage that says “EMERGENCY EXIT” all over it leads outside.

But this is what we get now. Because there was a time when air travel was synonymous with elegance. Watch old Twilight Zones from the early 1960s and you see guys wearing suits and ties. In the 70s stewardesses were considered sexy and served you hot meals that were the height of style. When Bogart puts Lauren Bacall on that plane out of Casablanca, did it ever cross his mind that Victor Lazlo would open the wrong door on his way to take a piss? No chance. Back then it was expensive to fly, so you only got the elite of the elites. Now any 20-something who uses the same credit cards for all his video game downloads and iTunes purchases can earn up enough points to get a ticket from New Dehli to Patna and almost kill everybody on board with his own stupidity.

In just a few generations air travel has gone from the symbol of class, sex appeal and romance to a city bus with wings. Until we can do for the passenger jet what we’ve done for healthcare, farming, streaming television and the cellphone, I’m only getting on a plane as a last resort.