Flight attendant reveals the three dangerous 'influencer trends' that drive cabin crew 'crazy'
An ex-flight attendant has slammed the worst behaviours being popularised by influencers on board flights.
Skye Taylor, who worked for Virgin Atlantic for 16 years, took to TikTok to complain about the most annoying 'influencer trends' that infuriate cabin crew.
Skye, from Southampton, feared social media influencers were encouraging people to try 'unsafe' trends by posting dangerous behaviours to their thousands of online followers.
One of the worst behaviours she slammed as 'absolutely crazy' was letting babies sleep on the floor of an aircraft.
She revealed: 'The amount of people that show their babies sleeping on the floor is absolutely crazy.
'You certainly wouldn't go and put your child in the footwell of a car.
'Why would you put them on the floor of an aircraft that could potentially drop 10,000ft within minutes and your child is laying on the floor under metal?'
Some people put their babies on the plane floor during a flight - much to the annoyance of flight crew
Another trend which left the former stewardess appalled was writing on the bathroom mirror.
Skye said this was something 'younger generations' did not realise could result in a 'massive security risk.'
'There was one TikTok and there was writing all over the aircraft mirror.
'There have been quite a lot of occasions in terrorist attacks where writing on a bathroom mirror was quite a horrible thing.'
Skye recalled a horrifying incident from April 2010, when a passenger on board a Continental Express flight headed from Houston to Washington scrawled "bomb" on the lavatory mirror.
The flight was forced to be rerouted and, after being thoroughly searched, thankfully no explosives were found.
The incident highlighted how something 'trivial' to TikTokers like writing in lipstick on a toilet mirror can endanger fellow passengers.
More recently, in 2022, a Condor Airways flight travelling from Frankfurt to Seattle made an emergency landing in Iceland after a full-scale terror response was activated by someone graffitiing a bomb threat on the bathroom mirror.
Terrified flight attendants informed passengers that they had to land because the bathrooms were out of order. Passengers were then patted down by police and several had their mugshots taken, after an extensive search eventually uncovered the bathroom scrawl as a cruel hoax.
Writing on the plane bathroom mirror can spark fear after a spate of bomb threats being left in a similar way, Skye Taylor warned
The final trend which Taylor warned flyers against was taking selfies near plane engines.
Skye pointed out that travellers breaching security markings on the ground to get influencer friendly holiday snaps next to aircraft engines, which generate tens of thousands of horsepower, was 'not the smartest idea.'
Not only can UK passengers get fined tens of thousands of pounds by airlines for breaching civil aviation rules, but getting too close to a plane's engine could be fatal.
An operating jet engine is so powerful that it could suck in a person standing near to its 'ingestion zone'.
While airport staff are trained to stand at least ten metres away from the engine, first time flyers influenced by uninformed TikTokkers could put their lives at risk by following selfie trends.
The former cabin crew also criticised customers who go online to complain about flights, as she claimed that cabin crew faced the brunt of customer's anger when they are told to adhere to safety regulations.
Taking photos near the plane engine can be dangerous, and also get in the way of busy airport ground staff as they help with flight preparations
She said: 'I saw somebody saying the crew member refused to hold her baby while she went to the bathroom.
'But we are not allowed to hold babies anymore, that is a safety thing that was changed.
'If we do want to hold a baby, we have to find a secure seat, strap ourselves in, and put that baby on our lap.'
She also urged passengers not to bring large, unsafe car seats that would block the aisle in case of an evacuation.
Skye revealed on her TikTok page, where she hopes to educate the public about flight safety, that crew members get six weeks of safety training and just two days of service training - showing where the staff's real priorities lie.
