Oh. Boy. I’m glad I wasn’t on this United Airlines flight with my wife and kids because they would have landed us on the front page of the news. Why? According to a viral thread on Reddit, passengers spotted a giant cockroach hitching a free ride on the plane and as you can imagine, it caused quite a stir. RELATED: Mosquito Mayhem: Volaris Plane in Mexico Swarmed By Bloodthirsty Insects

A Reddit user named WeeklyPancake posted: “I have never in all my years flying experienced this before, but the other day I boarded a flight with united and after seating, as the plane is rolling out of the gate the woman next to me leaps up screaming for her life. She was already settled in with a blanket and ipad etc so her stuff goes flying. A giant roach is just staring us down on the row of seats in front of us. We scramble to try to smash it but it slips into the seats before we can. The row in front of us freaks out trying to find it, so now 6 people are all terrified. The flight attendant approaches telling us to be seated, and several people plead with them to handle the roach. They respond stone faced that we must remain seated. The 6 of us sit in fear for the next 4 hours that a roach will just crawl up on us at any moment.”

Roach on flight
byu/WeeklyPancake inunitedairlines

Just imagining the mayhem is pretty funny and if this happened to my wife and kids, they would have screamed so loud and ran so fast, I know someone would have recorded it and there’d be a viral video circulating. The comments are pretty funny and some are actually educational, too. I’ll get to those ones in a minute but first, the funny ones:

tinypill: “I’ve had it with these MF roaches on this MF plane.” (A take on Samuel L. Jackson’s famous line from Snakes on a Plane, in case you aren’t familiar.)

delcodick: “Pets really should be banned from the passenger cabin.”

okgusto: “Emotional support roach. Don’t worry he’s friendly.”

Now for the educational comments:

Ea61e: “If it’s a big guy they don’t usually infest inside, he probably crawled in at the gate from the ramp or through the cargo hold, so most likely a one-off. If it’s a little one, that plane’s infested and needs to be deep cleaned. Source: I live in Hawaii, we are very familiar with roaches here.”

Flight_to_nowhere_26: “I’ve seen lots of critters hitch a ride on the plane in my many years as a FA but the worst one was a rat. We began boarding just after getting catered and I was doing inventory in the FWD galley. I opened up a meal cart and out ran a rat. I tried to corner it, hollered for help, the FO came out to assist and it ran right past him into the cockpit and jumped right into the captain’s lap. I’ve never seen someone get out of a seat so fast. So maintenance was called, thinking it was just a write up since it disappeared and we couldn’t find it. We figured it scurried back out of the cockpit but no one actually saw it leave. The mechanic said “did you actually see it leave the cockpit?” And we all said no. The mechanic let out a big sigh and told the captain “this AC is now grounded until we find it. Rats like to chew things and there happens to be a lot of important wires up there. Sorry!” That was a fun announcement followed by a few manly men berating the pilots for being “afraid” of a rat which, of course, wasn’t the reason the flight cxld.”

It’s not clear which flight this took place on but cockroaches don’t bother me. However, as I’ve already said, my wife is another story. We were in New York City last summer and while walking back to our hotel with the kids, it started pouring rain. We ducked into the closest shop, which happened to be a pizza place. We couldn’t just hang out with buying anything (and who doesn’t like a NY pizza?) so I ordered some pizza and pasta.

While we were waiting, I noticed a cockroach on the floor approaching an elderly woman sitting down. I chased it away from the woman and it flew on to the wall. That’s when my wife and kids spotted it and started their low-grade freak-out. All of a sudden, the cockroach flew towards us and landed on my shirt. As you can probably imagine, there was a moment or two of chaos as my wife and kids screamed their heads off and ran outside.

They would rather stand outside in the pouring rain than wait in a dry place and eat pizza with a cockroach.

My point is that some people have an uncontrollable fear of cockroaches. I don’t and would have had no problem with that cockroach on the plane.  However, having a rat on the loose, like in the story recounted by a flight attendant, is way more nerve racking to me since they like to chew wires and that’s a no-no anytime but especially 36,000 feet in the air.

How about you? Have you ever seen a cockroach or any other insects on a plane before?

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