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Flight attendants are begging passengers to keep their hands to themselves at 35,000 feet.
Cabin crew members say travelers are constantly poking, pinching, tapping and grabbing them mid-flight — and many say the behavior has gotten so out of hand that some attendants now wear “no touching” patches and pins while working the aisle.
“It’s almost a rare occurrence when it doesn’t happen,” veteran flight attendant Michelle Montez, who has worked in the skies for 20 years, said in a recent podcast appearance regarding unwanted touching from passengers.
Montez recently vented about the inflight annoyance on the “Jumpseat Chronicles Podcast,” alongside fellow flight attendants Joshua Boyd and Darion Foy — and all three made it clear this isn’t just turbulence-level irritation.
“You can talk to any flight attendant for any airline, and they will all agree that that’s something that we cannot stand and that we deal with so often, it’s insane,” Foy said, revealing he’s even been pinched on the butt by passengers multiple times.
Apparently, some travelers still think summoning a flight attendant works like ringing for room service.
But crew members say there’s a simple fix: use your words.
“You probably wouldn’t go into a restaurant and poke your waitress,” Sam Wilkins, a Southwest flight attendant and union leader, told The Washington Post in a recent interview.
And despite years of passengers being told not to abuse the overhead call button, attendants say they’d actually prefer that over random mid-cabin manhandling.
On the aforementioned podcast, Boyd noted that he’d rather have passengers “hit the call light” than touch him in any way.
“You do not have to touch me to get [what you want],” he stressed. “I just want to hear your sweet voice.”
And for many attendants, the problem goes far beyond annoying elbow taps.
And while some passengers may think a quick poke on the shoulder is harmless, flight attendants say inflight boundary-crossing can spiral into something far uglier.
Last year, a passenger aboard a Russian flight allegedly went berserk just minutes after takeoff — ultimately punching two flight attendants after they refused to hand over a cellphone, as previously reported by The Post.
The midair meltdown unfolded aboard a Pobeda Airlines flight traveling from Novosibirsk to Moscow on Aug. 23, 2025, according to reports from Aviation Knowledge.
The passenger, identified as Valeria E., allegedly began acting aggressively and frightening fellow travelers shortly after the plane left the runway.
Crew members approached the woman in an attempt to de-escalate the situation after passengers reportedly complained about her behavior.
Flight attendants even handed her paperwork outlining the airline’s code of conduct, but the gesture reportedly did little to calm her down as she crumpled it and threw it.
Wild footage from the flight showed stunned passengers jumping in to restrain the woman and drag her away from the vestibule as she laughed hysterically.
She was ultimately strapped into her seat with permission from the plane’s commander until the flight landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where authorities removed her from the aircraft.
The assaulted flight attendants reportedly declined medical treatment and instead headed straight to airport officials to document their injuries and file reports.
And that wasn’t the only recent case of crew members being harassed in the skies.
A Ryanair flight attendant named Chloe Harrison said she was relentlessly heckled by drunken soccer fans during a 2023 flight from Manchester to Barcelona packed with Manchester United supporters.
The British stewardess said the men became increasingly rowdy after the plane ran out of beer and vodka — and soon began loudly chanting vulgar comments at her while she worked the aisle.
The flight attendant recalled hearing chants including “Get your t-ts out” and “Chloe’s got a nice a–e,” while another passenger allegedly propositioned her for sex in the bathroom.
Harrison said the men appeared to remember her name from the crew’s preflight announcements, and their behavior only escalated as the booze kept flowing.
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