A woman flying United from Huntsville to Houston on a Wednesday evening in June boarded the regional jet and found she had it to herself.
Under the username u/Sufficient_Fudge_280, she later posted a photo of the empty plane on Reddit captioned, “Somehow the only person on my flight and the pilot was such a goofy goober.”
She got her own personalized preflight announcements. The flight attendant also ran the full safety demonstration for an audience of one, laughing the whole way through it.
Before takeoff, the crew brought sandbags into the cabin. She wrote that it was “bc the plane was too light with only one passenger,” though that isn’t quite the reason. It’s not that planes are too light to fly, but with an empty cabin, the center of gravity can shift, and that extra weight pulls it back in. On a small regional jet with one person aboard, sandbags are a normal way to solve that problem.
After landing and taxiing in, the captain invited her up to the flight deck to sit in the seat and look around.
“The crew was so cool,” she wrote, adding that the whole thing was funny and joyful.
Reddit mostly enjoyed it, with one commenter calling it a “poor man’s private jet.” Another said, “I would have been freaking out at the gate, thinking I was in the wrong place because nobody else was there.” A third quipped, “Still made her gate check her bag for lack of bin space.”
