Joe was a flight attendant for Fly High airlines. He watched as an older lady boarded the plane carrying a dog in a travel crate.

 “Excuse me,” said Joe. “Only service dogs are allowed with the passengers. You need to check your pet carrier in with the baggage.” The lady wasn’t happy, but Joe was an experienced attendant and succeeded in convincing the lady without much of a scene. 

Upon arrival, Joe took a peek in the cage, and to his great surprise, saw that the dog was dead! Frantic that they might get sued, Joe quickly sent someone out to town to buy a dog that looked exactly the same. Just in the nick of time he arrived with the dog, They switched pets and breathed a sigh of relief. 

“What’s happened to my dog?” asked the lady as soon as she saw it. “I’m sure it’s fine,” insisted Joe. “I was very careful about where I put it.” 

“No, I’m trying to tell you that’s not my dog, unless you’re a miracle worker!” argued the lady. “You see, I was bringing Jodie back home to have him buried, and this dog is clearly alive!”

Plane and Simple

Larry was a photographer for the New York Times, and was scheduled to meet a plane on the runway to take him on a job. 

“Hit it,” said Larry climbing into the first plane he saw on the runway. The pilot took off, and was soon in the air. 

“OK,” said Larry, “fly low over the trees over there, I want to take a few pictures.”

“What do you mean?” asked the pilot. Larry looked at the pilot and answered, a little annoyed, “I need to take some pictures for the N.Y. Times, so please…..” 

There was a long pause, before the pilot asked in a shaky voice, “You’re not my flight instructor?”

A Helping Hand

In other countries, you may be asked to give a push to a car stuck in the mud. In Russia, passengers in the Arctic came out of an airliner into the bitter cold to help it move to the runway.

A Russian-made Tu-134 with 74 oil workers and seven crew members onboard was due to fly from the town of Igarka one Tuesday to Krasnoyarsk, 800 miles to the south, when the plane couldn’t move onto the runway. It was -52 C (-61 F) outside and the passengers seemed desperate to get home.

The plane belonged to a regional division of the major Russia airline UTair, which said ice on the runway surface caused the plane’s pushback tractor to begin slipping, according to the state news agency RIA Novosti.

Eager to help, several dozen men were seen in an amateur video pushing the plane by leaning on both wings. However, the video also showed a tow bar attached to the front landing-gear, suggesting the tractor was doing much of the work.

“The plane was towed, of course, because it would be physically impossible for people (to move it),” Oksana Gorbunova, an aide to the regional transportation prosecutor, was quoted as saying by the state news agency Tass.

“Most likely, the passengers of the plane decided to make some kind of selfie,” airport director Maxim Aksenov was quoted as saying by Tass.

Russian authorities, however, weren’t amused by the incident, and prosecutors launched an investigation into a possible breach of safety regulations.

“It would be funny if it didn’t pose a horrendous threat. People could have damaged the aircraft skin and the flaps,” said Gorbunova.

Gorbunova said the passengers were asked to leave the plane when it got stuck. When a tractor began towing the airliner, some of the passengers left a bus and tried to help move it.