It’s not something that happens often on a flight, so for it to happen twice, on two separate occasions, left me in complete shock.
I was recently on an SA Airlink flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town sitting at the front of the plane when an elderly man attempted to open the plane’s emergency exit door mid-flight.
At first, I had no idea what was going on.
I was sitting on the left side of the plane and the drama was unfolding behind the wall in front of me.
I had my headphones in but was quickly distracted when I noticed passengers around me becoming distressed and instructing a man to “stop”.
I took my headphones out, leaned over and noticed a man tugging at the exit door handle. My heart immediately dropped.
“What are you doing?” a passenger sitting opposite me frantically asked the man, to which he calmly responded, “where is the toilet?”
Wild but true – he mistook the exit door for the lavatory.
So many questions were running through my head: ‘Has this person never flown before?’ ‘How do they not know the difference between a plane door and toilet door?’.
The same thing happened on the way back on the same airline.
Another man thought he was opening the toilet door.
What was going on? I mean, surely the window above the lever was a clue about what was on the other side of that door.
On both occasions the flight attendants were on the other end of the plane serving food and drinks, so fellow passengers had to intervene.
Professor Doug Drury, head of aviation at Central Queensland University, said first time flyers is the best explanation for a mistake like this.
“When we look at the toilet in the back of the plane our eyes are drawn to the complex design of the galley and not the toilets that stand at the entry to the galley,” he said. “When the exit door is the only thing you see it would confuse any first-time flyers.”
It’s rare but it happens.
In July this year, a first-time female flyer accidentally opened the emergency door of an Air China flight while trying to find the toilet.
The aircraft was waiting on the tarmac when she went to the back of the plane to use the toilet.
When she opened the door, the evacuation slide unfolded in front of her prompting the flight to be cancelled, according to the Daily Mail.
Meanwhile, in 2018, an Indian man, also a first-time flyer, sparked panic mid-air when he tried to open a plane door, mistaking it for the toilet.
He was traveling on a GoAir flight from New Delhi to Patna when he was intercepted by crew.
When fellow passengers asked him what he was doing he told them he “needed to use the washroom urgently and kept tugging at the exit door”, The Telegraph, a Kolkata-based newspaper, quoted an airport official as saying.
“Pandemonium prevailed amid all this and he was restrained and finally handed over to us.
“He said that the confusion happened because he had boarded a flight for the first time in his life,” Mohammad Sanowar Khan told the newspaper.
A spokesperson for the airline said the man wouldn’t have succeeded in opening the door anyway due to air pressure in the cabin.
Mr Drury explained the exit door on a plane cannot be opened above 10,000 feet in altitude as the cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet.
“So that when we are at 35,000 feet, we are not feeling the lack of gravity and we are breathing normal air,” he said.
“Additionally, the pressurization above 10,000 feet means that the exit door, like the rest of the aircraft, has 600lbs per square inch holding it secure.”
So, what’s the solution?
Mr Drury said the industry could continue to use curtains to block the galley or even a sliding door for crew.
“However this adds more weight to the aircraft which is more fuel burn, which is more costs, which means higher ticket prices.”