‘I’d actually prefer to ride on the wing’: Woman makes a big mistake while booking her plane seat, and now she’s never going to recover

Plenty of people have a phobia around flying in airplanes, and despite how overwhelmingly safe they tend to be, few would blame them for being afraid. You’re in a giant piece of metal traveling at intense speeds high in the sky: of course that’s scary.

But folks, if you don’t already have an aversion to flying, look away now; what you’re about to witness isn’t a plane crash or anything of the sort, but rather a development that will plant itself firmly in your nightmares for the rest of time, regardless of whether or not they have to do with airplanes.

TikTok‘s @jesssmith_36 was courteous enough to share this little predicament with the rest of us, but frankly, we wish she didn’t. As you can see in the six-second video above, Jess thought it wise to book herself in the first row of her flight (according to the description, she was off to Greece) as a little treat to herself, not realizing that the first row does not face the same direction as the rest of the plane.

Thus, Jess spent her entire plane ride facing the rest of the passengers, the single most effective way to make someone’s skin crawl in the entire history of forever. I don’t care if your mortal essence inhabits the antithesis of social anxiety; this situation is utterly mythological in its embarrassment, and we have no doubt that Jess’ brain chemistry was being rewritten in real-time during that flight.

Now, this is not intended to villainize backward-facing seats; in fact, proper installation of them would ease flying anxieties rather than escalate them to unthinkable degrees as it does here. According to David Learmount, then-operations and safety editor at FlightGlobal.com, in a 2018 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, rear-facing seats are safer than forward-facing seats, as they would end up taking more of the strain and impact in the event of a crash. He also mentioned, however, that such a change would be costly for several reasons, and that customer preference plays a role in why we don’t see many rear-facing seats.

Of course, when he says customer preference, he means people who get sick on account of travel (which, of course, backward-facing seats would do no favors for), not people who want to be put front and center for the entire plane to bare witness to, as though preparing to address the nation is just part of travel costs nowadays.