Aircraft Passenger Seat Types – The Worst Ones To Sit Next To!

I love travelling. I don’t mind the long haul flights out of Australia, because I’m looking forward to the destination at the other end.

But sometimes, the plane trip can become less than desirable due to the potential passengers that might be sitting next to you, and that you have no over control of especially if the plane is full. That’s right, this silly article is about some of the shonky Aircraft Passenger Types that you might come across in the seat next to you!

In reality, most of the time I’ve been seated next to people who are no problem at all. But there have been a few dodgy types which have annoyed the hell out of me and they’ve been hard to escape – and these experiences usually occur in cattle class!

Sounds like another dose of first world problems!

So here they are!

The Most Annoying Airline Passenger Types that sometimes sit next to you!

The Person Unaware of their own Body Odour

By far, the most unpleasant kind of passenger type I’ve come across. There’s nothing like sitting next to someone who smells like rotting flesh for a ten hour flight. And it doesn’t matter if you spray an entire bottle of duty free perfume on them either to disguise the stench, because the offensive odour will overpower pretty much anything you throw on it.

There’s nothing you can do about this person except for scrambling for another seat at the opposite end of the plane with a peg on your nose. I think sitting next to a smelly person is enough grounds to be upgraded to business class!

The Farter

Almost as bad as the bad body odour person, this annoying passenger has obviously eaten way too much of something that hasn’t agreed with their stomach and gasto-intestinal juices – just in time for your flight. Unfortunately, that rumbling that you feel under the seat is not from the planes engines – it’s from your next door seat buddy. Depending on the situation, it may not be too bad – if it’s just air, well that can sort of be tolerated – and the infrequent rhythms might actually send you to sleep. But if there is sulphur gas involved in the back door release (either via a ‘silent killer’ or a ‘trouser trumpet’), you might need to snort a whole container of smelling salts just to combat the anal stench.

As an added bonus, the seat can often act as a ‘store and release system’ so their anal infusion will still permeate from the seat on the next leg of your journey. But that’s better than you sitting in that seat and absorbing the release of gas in your clothes – which means you’ll probably have to incinerate them when you arrive at your destination.

The Job Spruiker

‘So, what do you do?’ How many  times have you heard this whilst striking up a conversation with the person sitting next to you? Even worse, they’re in the same profession as you – even if you mention to them that you’re a drug dealer or nuclear physicist! This opening line then sets off a bland conversation of endless shop talk – when you’re trying to get away from thinking about work!

And even if you like talking about your job, they then want to download every single one of your contacts without giving you any of theirs.

You could always try to shut them up by saying ‘I don’t want a career, I just want a salary’.

The non-seat mover

Unfortunately, you might be stuck in a window seat for 12 hours and you might need to go to the toilet quite often, or even just to stretch your legs just so that you don’t die from deep vein thrombosis. This person refuses to move or even budge whenever you need to get out of your seat. But you can give their bad karma back to them. Depending on the plane configuration, you might have your own obstacle course to negotiate and if you have weak bladder/bowel function, and if you don’t make it in time, you might actually urinate/defecate on their legs on the way out. Then you’ve got the whole row to yourself!

The Avid Chatter

Probably the most common annoying passenger that you are most likely to come across. You’re just trying to be nice and acknowledge that you’re sitting next to someone, but then this is the green light for your next door neighbhour to spend hours talking crap about anything from knitting needles to the most entertaining Air Crash Investigation episodes. It doesn’t matter if you start watching your in flight entertainment system or put on your own headphones from your smart phone or tablet, this person has ways and strategies to uncouple your earphones from your ear drums so that their chit chat reaches your brain before anything else.

By far, the worst one I’ve personally come across on a long haul was the guy in his sixties banging on about how great his sex tour to South East Asia was. It was like feeding my ears through a meat mincer and having him eat them.

The Obese Person

There’s nothing like watching the fear on my face when I’ve realised that the biggest person on the plane is about to sit next to you. You just know that your personal space is about to be violated and invaded. And you know there is no way out once they sit down. I’ve sat in an emergency exit seat only to have the passenger sitting next to me be twice as big as me, crushing me against the window. I have no idea how this guy passed the ‘are you able to assist in an emergency test’, but I ended up paying for it!

The Travel Blogger

When you chat to this person, they’ll tell you how awesome their life is by being a ‘digital nomad’ because they quit their boring cubicle job to travel the world – but they haven’t manage to leave Thailand yet, which is their first stop! But because they’ve spent their entire trip (in Thailand) in an internet cafe working on their website, now they generate enough money from their website to live in a third world country for a few months but they’re too scared to go back to the first world these days..

So there you go. There are some annoying airline passenger types that you might come across on your next flight.

What others do you think should be on this list? Leave a comment and share it with the world!