Travel delays are annoying, but every now and then, one unravels into something far more chaotic and epic.
A long, grinding delay on the tarmac at Newark Liberty International Airport had pushed passengers to their limits, but one United Airlines traveler snapped spectacularly — hurling F-bombs and the C-word at a flight attendant before shifting mid-tirade.
A portion of the incident, captured on Nov. 10 and posted to TikTok by passenger HaleyRose99, has already racked up half a million views.
“This woman went absolutely nuts on my flight, and we had to return to the gate to remove her,” read the caption on the viral TikTok video.
But it’s not just the outburst that grabbed people — it’s the split second when the woman’s face shifts, and viewers joked they saw her soul leave her body.
In the clip, the woman sits in the window seat when an older woman in the aisle quietly stands to walk toward the back of the plane. A flight attendant approaches and gently taps the shoulder of the woman seated in the middle, motioning for her to get up as well. The moment that middle-seat passenger stands, the woman by the window shoots up behind her, bristling before the flight attendant can even finish speaking.
A Black flight attendant steps into view and tries to determine which direction the woman is heading, asking if she’s trying to reach the restroom. The woman is already on edge.
“I’m getting up, yeah. I’m allowed to get up,” she snaps, voice rising.
“When you keep us on the tarmac for over an hour, I’m allowed to stand up.”
The attendant reassures her calmly — “Not a problem” — but the woman keeps escalating.
“Not a problem at all? Really not a problem for me to want to f—ing stand? … f—ing c—.”
And then it happens. She looks up from her phone, locks eyes with the camera across the aisle — and freezes.
One viewer wrote, “And it was at this moment when she knew that she had f—ed up!”
@haleyrose99 This woman went absolutely nuts on my flight & we had to return back to the gate to remove her. #govshutdown #newarkairport ♬ original sound – HaleyRose99
“The eye contact with the camera is my favorite part,” wrote another. “I was so scared for you when she locked eyes,” joked another viewer on TikTok.
Yet another added, “That is the exact moment she knew she was screwed 
”
Others called out her interaction with the flight attendant. “If u notice the flight attendant says she can stand but someone had already just got up to go to the rest room, she didn’t need to flip out on the attendants,” wrote another commentor.
To which another viewer responded, “That was her intention. She needed somewhere to direct her anger when no one was bothering her and she took it out on the FA. The FA wasn’t even argumentative but she was. She behaved like a rabid dog.”
View on Threads
But the video doesn’t show how the meltdown started — and that’s where the tension really begins.
In her follow-up Storytime, Haley described the meltdown that continued after the video cut off. “Buckle up,” she began. “This was truly one of the wildest travel experiences I’ve ever had.”
Granted, the flight was delayed by at least three hours, and as it was finally taxiing to the runway, the pilot announced another hour-and-a-half delay.
“At this point, everyone is just over it, and you can feel the collective exhaustion,” HaleyRose99 explained, but one woman screaming the C-word stunned the cabin into silence.
@haleyrose99 Storytime!!! Newark-Charleston Flight incident explained!
The woman sitting next to her pleaded, “Ma’am, can you please chill?” According to Haley, “That was just not the right thing to say to her, because she just completely loses it.”
After the passenger told that woman to “unalive herself,” the flight attendants stepped in and moved everyone sitting next to her, and that’s when “she started spiraling,” said Haley. The quick-thinking crew then had the “biggest guys on the flight” flank the passenger on each side before she was eventually escorted off the plane.
Flight attendants, like the one in the video, often bear the brunt of bad behavior by passengers, and the vast majority of those workers — nearly 80 percent — are women, with about half being women of color. Many flight attendants have more than one flight in a day and are surprisingly not paid for long ground delays or even the time before takeoff — the clock starts when the airplane’s doors close.
The United Airlines union, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, is currently negotiating for raises and improvements in quality of life. But there’s no word on hazard pay or bonuses for dealing with obnoxious passengers.