This Man's Holiday Plane Ride Home Was an Actual Nightmare

What you’re looking at is a bolt that has just set itself free and launched out of the engine. Are you shaking? I am.

If you are already frightened of flying on airplanes and tend to white-knuckle it the entire way, staying awake so that the plane continues to remain afloat on the strength of your thoughts alone, you may never want to board a commercial airliner ever again. Because that stuff that happens in movies? The scenes where things come flying off planes? It totally happened in real life. The good news? It’s fairly rare. The bad news? OH MY GOD A BOLT CAME LOOSE WHILE IN THE AIR.

For someone like me, who has used the call button before because I noticed that there was some kind of flap on the wing that I didn’t like, the story is much more than can be handled. Here’s the information from Death and Taxes; try not to hyperventilate:

“I heard a loud POP, looked out my window at a bolt that flew off the prop and broke through the outer pane.”

The pilot later explained to him that it was one of the 12 spinner bolts that holds the engine on to the plane, and that he had never heard of it happening in his 25 years of professional flying.

Terrifying! And the whole “huh, never seen that before” statement isn’t really all that comforting. Neither is the fact that the man in the pictures had to get on the same plane after a layover. The only good news, according to D&T is that the terrified passenger got completely wrecked. Hopefully for free. A bolt flies off the plane? You deserve several tiny bottles of Vodka.