The Things They Carried—On Planes

We carry our things with us when we fly, and sometimes those things are weird. And even if they’re not weird, they might seem strange when juxtaposed with the airplane setting, an incongruity in such a modern environment.

Last week, four baby pythons evidently escaped their container in the cargo hold of a Qantas 737, slithered somewhere in the plane—and disappeared. The plane was later fumigated. I don’t know if the snakes belonged to a passenger or were just being shipped, but it does make me wonder: What weird things do people carry with them aboard?

Janet Engel, a former flight attendant for the now-cargo-only Arrow Air, remembers “a full set of tires” that a passenger carried onto a charter flight. “Not kidding,” she wrote in an email. “We grabbed them at the door and put them down in cargo.”

Sometimes items that are normal in one context seem extra strange on an aircraft. “I visited a garden store in Sonoma County that is known for its large selection of garden gnomes and somehow felt compelled to buy two, which I crammed into my carry-on,” Sophia Dembling wrote in an email. “And I get tickled every time I think about what that must have looked like in the x-ray.”

My friend Susanne told me this story: “I brought a large sunflower on board a plane once,” she wrote in an email. “I remember the middle of the flower was really sticky. I fell asleep on the plane with the flower in my lap, woke up, and the sunflower was totally glued to my boob like it was breast-feeding. Pretty ridiculous looking!”

Then there are the things that people try unsuccessfully to bring on the plane. An article (via the TSA’s blog) from early March in the Daily News rounds up the weird things that are stopped at security or, at the other end of the flight, at customs. TSA employees in New York City have encountered a “drug-filled dead cat, a frozen monkey head and a suitcase bursting with wriggling cockroaches in the past few weeks,” the article reports.

“A Chilean family once tried to wheel a dead relative through security in a wheelchair at JFK to avoid paying the fee for transporting a body,” the article adds. I guess you could say they didn’t want to get stiffed on the fee.

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