A Redditor has taken to social media to describe a terrifying encounter a pilot in their family experienced when a USN missile came soaring within view of their commercial Boeing 737 plane.
Some wild things happen during commercial flights — take the flight attendant who survived a 30,000-foot fall without a parachute or the pilot who sucked out of his cockpit as prime examples — but few are as scary as this particular story…
Back in 2021, a Redditor — who goes by the username u/miercole — took to the platform’s ‘Ask Reddit’ channel to pose the question: ‘Pilots, what’s the scariest stuff you’ve seen while flying?’ Suffice to say, the tale we’re about to discuss received over a thousand upvotes and was, by quite some way, the most popular response given.
WATCH: Flight Attendant Survives 30,000 Feet Fall From Plane Without Parachute.
It was user ‘NAbbott_737‘ that posted the winning tale that described a scenario endured by their father, the pilot on a commercial Boeing 737 aircraft, flying “somewhere in Nevada I think on the way back to Toronto”. They began by setting the initially quite tranquil scene…
“It was later in the evening, so you couldn’t see too much, but all of a sudden to the left of the plane my dad saw a really bright ball of light I guess you could say, moving really fast across the sky.”
NAbbott_737
If I were a commercial pilot, I may find myself momentarily wondering whether I was imagining things, or if this was nothing more than a bit of sun glare bouncing off the windshield at an unfortunate angle. However, their suspicions were confirmed shortly thereafter…
“My dad and his co-pilot had no clue what it was, and they could hear other pilots nearby calling it in over the radio and asking what it was. Eventually, it flew pass and disappeared into the distance….”
NAbbott_737
In their position, I suppose you’d be plenty happy with this outcome; the object disappeared from view and everyone was seemingly unharmed and un-delayed. By any measure, this is a huge success in commercial aviation terms.
However, shortly after the flight had landed and the pilots returned home to their respective families, the news of what the object actually was had begun to do the rounds…
“A few days later my dad found out that what he saw was a missile launched by a USN submarine.”
NAbbott_737
While this might sound like a tall tale to some, given its fairly relatively unverifiable source, other commenters piled in behind the poster, confirming what had happened:
“I remember this. It was on or just before Halloween and we were having a party in our backyard… My husband pointed it out in the sky… We saw on the news the next day that it was a test missile fired from a US sub in the Pacific… We see lots of weird s*** in the sky here over Vegas.”
stepenyaki
“I was helping a friend move that night. It was crazy.”
puskunk
So folks, remember that what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas; sometimes it’s worthy of national news and — in the most extreme of scenarios — it resurfaces in the ivory towers of Reddit many years thereafter…