Sky-High Scandals: The 9 Most Outrageous Mile High Club Encounters

In an era where the fringes of passenger decorum are tested with the same vigor as our patience for flight delays, the mile high club has seen membership sky-rocket – sometimes in full view of the cabin.

Whether it’s the recent Ryanair spectacle, a spontaneous lap dance at 30,000 feet escalated into something straight out of a tabloid’s fever dream, or a supermodel’s complaint that passengers don’t give her privacy while she becomes intimate with her girlfriend at her seat, the skies are bustling with more than just air traffic. Here are the 9 greatest instances of Mile High Club adventures.

  1. Joining at their seats Usually the Mile High Club happens in the lavatory, so when passengers do it in full view at their seats it’s notable. Here Ryanair passengers were filmed, and flight crew refused to get involved. The woman in the video is a 39 year old mother of three who says she was “only performing a lap dance” (“She insists she wasn’t having sex with the guy, but admits it looks bad” though passengers reported hearing the man ask for a condom). The man and woman “had just met that day.”

  2. Elizabeth Hurley in the old British Airways first class. Elizabeth Hurley was caught trying to join the mile high club in British Airways first class. This was 2003, before ‘New First’, the cabins really weren’t very private.

    Actress Lara Flynn Boyle also flashed her breasts and tried to climb into bed with a male stranger on a British Airways first class flight to Los Angeles around the same time.

  3. Model/actress incredulous that people watched It goes without saying that if you’re going to have sex in your seat, you can’t really complain when other passengers watch. However Cara Delevingne disagrees. The supermodel apparently has been with both men and women inflight.

    “I’ve had sex in planes a lot,” Cara boasted. “But I’ve always been caught. It’s super-hard not to get caught.”

    One raunchy encounter drew the attention of a fellow traveller, and when the man refused to look away, Cara called on a flight attendant to complain.

    “I had sex in the chair on the plane and there was a guy watching. We ended up telling the air stewardess what was happening,” she recalled. “Like, ‘This guy keeps staring at us. Can you tell him to stop?'”


    Cara Delevingne, Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, Copyright buzzfuss / 123RF Stock Photo

    If a world famous supermodel is having sex in the seat next to me, I’m going to do my best to look away. It’s awkward, and that’s on her. But the notion that she’s copping to having sex on a commercial flight and wants the flight attendant to help secure her privacy is truly beyond the pale, don’t you think?

  4. And they lost his luggage. Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe was married to Heather Locklear and to Pamela Anderson. While dating comedienne Brittany Furlan – who was apparently once the most followed person on Vine – he took a trip on American Airlines from Nassau to Miami. They managed to spend part of the one hour Embraer E-175 flight joining the Mile High Club. And another passenger caught their lavatory exit on video. Here comes Tommy Lee.. and then about 25 seconds later his girlfriend emerges as well.

    And then American Airlines lost their luggage.

  5. Passengers who just met overcame the inflight requirement during the Covid-19 pandemic.

  6. Degree of difficulty/cleanliness: managing it on United Airlines. Team USA Beach Volleyballer Stafford Slick videotaped two passengers emerging from the lavatory together on his United flight.

    Women were lining up for the lavatory for about ten minutes, and no one was coming out. When the lavatory door opens a man appears and then “[j]ust a few seconds later, a woman in a matching red jumper also walks out from the cramped room, apparently having just joined the Mile High Club.”

  7. The Victoria’s Secret model. Kelly Gale admits that she’s a member of the Mile High Club, and says she got caught as she finished up.

    There’s no photos of the incident, but here she is doing inflight yoga on Virgin Australia. She performed an inflight fashion show for them.

    A post shared by Kelly Gale (@kellybellyboom) on

  8. Flight attendant opens door on the happy couple. When it became clear that passengers on a Ryanair flight were recoding their Mile High membership, a flight attendant opened the lavatory door to reveal them to the rest of the cabin after passengers egged him on to do it. Realizing they were exposed, the man inside quickly shut the door, while passengers cheered (and filmed).

    The flight was headed to Ibiza on the man’s 23rd birthday. He’s a car salesman, and the couple had just met at the airport. His mother saw the video on television. According to his mother, “You’re aware these things are going to happen at the holiday destination but you don’t expect it to happen on the flight.”

  9. The very first instance of the Mile High Club. Lawrence Burst Sperry, inventor of the autopilot, was the first to join the Mile High Club way back in 1916. He took a woman, whose husband was driving an ambulance in France during World War I, up in a Curtiss Flying Boat C‑2. The two were 500 feet above the Long Island coast. During their adventure they bumped the autopilot. It disengaged, and they dropped into the bay. They were rescued by duck hunters – naked.

Honorable mention: Best fabricated mile high club story goes to former flight attendant ‘Cierra Misst’ who claims that, on a regional jet flight to Nashville where the passengers were all bachelor and bachelorette party groups, everyone got handsy, and several people joined the Mile High Club – including a new pilot. Two lavatories on an Embraer E-175 regional jet flying perhaps two and a half hours, with the co-pilot in the cockpit for most of the flight, somehow meeting with the passengers and joining in? This clearly did not happen. But it’s a good story.

As we navigate the turbulent airspace of public intimacy, one must ponder: when did the fasten seatbelt sign become a mere suggestion?

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  1. Everyone claims to want a return to more civilized air travel. Glorifying this kind of trashy behavior makes air travel even more degraded than it already is.

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