Skirmantas Strimaitis bought a flight from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to Italy on March 16 only to show up and find that he was the only person booked on the plane.
I know what you’re thinking: this is the ideal flight. But if I showed up to my flight and I’m the only one? It’s going to take a hell of a lot to convince me that the plane is okay to fly, and that there isn’t a multi-government conspiracy to murder me somewhere along the flight path and dump my body.
But according to the Associated Press, Strimaitis’solitude was not malicious, he was just lucky. He was the only passenger on the 737-800 with a maximum seating capacity of 189 because a travel agency had chartered the plane for a separate group for its return flight after it landed in Italy.
To try to make up some money off of getting the plane to Italy, the airline offered one-way tickets and only Strimaitis bought one.
And he wasn’t completely alone, because there were two pilots and five crew members, the latter of which probably just awkwardly hung out by the bathrooms talking about how creepy it is to fly on a nearly empty airplane.
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If you want to know how particularly unsettling it is to have an entire flight crew of people on a 737 all to yourself, Abigail Disney,the granddaughter of Walt Disney described how uncomfortable it was for her when she took her family’s private jet alone for the first time in this interview with The Cut last week:
When did you stop riding the private jet?
The moment for me, when I decided I couldn’t fly in the plane anymore, was about 20 years ago. I had to fly out to California for a meeting but I had to get back to New York by the next morning for a conference. And the guy who ran our family’s company put me on the 737 alone. I flew across the country overnight, by myself on that giant plane, and I was sitting there thinking about the carbon footprint and the number of flight attendants and the other pilot on-call and what it was costing, and I just wanted to be sick. By the way, my parents always made fun of the fact that I thought it was terrible and awful because they were very comfortable with what they were doing.
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See, if I was this Strimaitis guy, I’d be mad they even made me pay for a plane that was already going that direction with or without me.
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