Woman Wakes Up Totally Alone on Empty, Parked Air Canada Plane

My reoccurring nightmares often involve planes, and they often involve total abandonment. But until today, it’d never occurred to my subconscious to put the two together. Unluckily for one Air Canada passenger, waking up on an empty, cold, (fortunately) grounded aircraft wasn’t even a nightmare, but a very terrible reality!

Tiffani Adams wrote in a Facebook post that instead of being nudged awake by a fellow passenger or flight attendant when her plane touched down in Toronto earlier this month, everyone just went ahead and deplaned without her, leaving her “all alone” in a “cold dark” aircraft.

“I think I’m having a bad dream bc like seriously how is this happening!!?!” she wrote in the June 19 post, according to the AP.

Horrifying, but okay, no problem—surely she’s got a phone and can just call for help, right? NOPE. Her phone was dead, and couldn’t be charged because the plane’s power was off. Adams wrote that she eventually found a “walky talky thingy” in the cockpit, but that didn’t work either.

At this point in the ordeal, I’d be preparing to gnaw my leg off and use it to bash open a window, or at least the lockbox where they keep the tiny booze bottles and pretzels. Adams was more industrious: After failing to attract attention by shining a flashlight she found out the window, she finally just unbolted the cabin door and yelled for the ground crew, who came to get her.

Adams said that as an apology for entombing her in a steel death capsule, Air Canada offered to have a limo take her to a hotel. Why, after narrowly avoiding death in one elongated form of transport, would you accept getting in another one? (The AP does not specify that it was a stretch limo, but I picture what I picture. And what I picture here is Adams, huddled on a slick black seat crying silent tears while a stripper pole and icy bottle of champagne go ignored in the foreground.)

Air Canada wrote in a statement that “We are still reviewing this matter so we have no additional details to share, but we have followed up with the customer and remain in contact with her.”

Adams, for her part, wrote that “I haven’t got much sleep since the reoccurring night terrors and waking up anxious and afraid I’m alone locked up someplace dark.” You don’t say!