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Airline passengers took to Reddit to complain about some of the most disgusting things they’d seen passengers get up to on a plane, and many agreed their habits were best left in the privacy of their homes

Being trapped in a metal tube at 30,000 feet seems to bring out the worst in people, and despite sharing a small space with dozens of others, some people treat the plane cabin like their personal living space.

A thread on Reddit’s AskUK titled “Worst thing you seen on a plane? What do you think is just not acceptable?” brought in over 200 responses, with holidaymakers keen to call out bad behaviour they’d seen onboard. And there were definitely some common themes among the complaints.

The original poster started the ball rolling, writing: “For me, it was that the lady sitting next to me was picking her toenails!” and many agreed lack of shoes was a huge etiquette breach. “I was sat next someone yesterday who took off their shoes and socks as soon as the opportunity allowed. They even went to the toilet barefoot.”, claimed one poster.

They added: “It wasn’t just the fact they were barefoot it was the general hygiene, e.g.: coughing and sneezing without covering, etc. They had me on edge the whole time thinking “right… I’m catching whatever disease they’ve absorbed through the soles of their gross feet.””

In a similar thread, posters complained about passengers doing tasks more suited to their private bathroom: “I don’t like it when people clip their toenails. I’ve seen it 3 times. Twice a row across from me and other time in my same row.”, said one. While another posted: “My wife and I were sitting in 1C and 1D. The guy in 1B pulled out dental floss after the meal and started going at his mouth like he was giving himself a root canal. Full on two handed flossing right in his seat.”

Another said: “I try to be kind and understanding of the difficulties and lack of facilities on this, but, a woman changed her baby’s ‘filled’ nappy in the middle of the cabin… twice. The stench roamed right through that B777.”

Instagram account @passengershaming has amassed over 1.3 million followers thanks to its hilarious posts that highlight some of the worst behaviour on planes. In one classic reel, a woman was seen using the overhead air vent to dry the crotch of her knickers. The viral video was captioned: “PRO TRAVEL TIP: Airplane air vents aren’t for drying underwear Kthx!”

Other examples posted to the account over the years include a woman using a foot file to remove hard skin, and a man opening a can of tuna on a plane for a snack, seemingly unperturbed about the smell in a confined space.

While the examples above are mostly harmless, if disgusting, behaviour, recently there have been calls to create a national database for abusive passengers, which would allow airlines to share information on disruptive passengers and restrict their access to flights.

According to the BBC, Department for Transport officials will be meeting later this month to discuss the proposals, and the database would likely be a collaboration between the government and the airline industry.

Have a story you want to share? Email us at webtravel@reachplc.com

With California facing increasingly destructive wildfires, experts and officials have long urged the strategic removal of dense, flammable vegetation that can erupt into particularly destructive flames from a lightning bolt or the spark of a power line.

But after years of record investment by the state in such wildfire risk mitigation, two key money sources are drying up, potentially reducing the state’s annual budget for vegetation removal by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Wildfire resiliency advocates are warning that the loss of these funds will leave the state vulnerable to devastation, and are calling on California’s next governor to take that threat seriously.

Currently, California relies heavily on two funding sources for wildfire mitigation work: A state program that charges polluters for their emissions and a climate bond approved by voters in 2024.

Late Friday, however, state officials adopted a new structure for the emissions program, called cap-and-invest, that analysts say will likely reduce wildfire mitigation funding by $200 million per year. At the same time, the governor’s latest budget proposal puts the state on track to allocate the majority of the climate bond’s $1.5 billion in wildfire prevention money within just three years.

As a result, California could go from routinely pulling more than $600 million a year from these sources, to just $150 million, according to an estimate from the Wildfire Solutions Coalition — a group of more than 80 organizations representing conservationists, business owners, fire officials and tribal leaders.

The coalition is urging the state to find new sources of funding for the work.

“We have the scientists, we have the technicians, we have the advocates,” said Michelle Decker, who is on the coalition’s executive committee and serves as president and CEO of the Inland Empire Community Foundation. “We see this problem. We can get ahead of this problem. It is a revenue issue.”

California wildfires have become increasingly costly. The 2025 L.A. fires alone caused an estimated $250 billion in damage and economic loss. Insurance companies have already paid out $22.4 billion.

In attempt to reduce the risk of damage to communities and ecosystems, the state has employed a wide range of tactics. These includes fortifying homes against wildfires, replanting fire-ravaged forests and thinning out vegetation with prescribed burns, goat grazing and manual thinning with heavy machinery to reduce the intensity of potential fires.

Research suggests wildfire mitigation work pays off. A recent analysis of 285 fires in the western U.S. found that every dollar spent on landscape projects saved about $3.75 in wildfire damage.

But as funding from cap-and-invest and the climate bond dwindle, the state must increasingly turn to Cal Fire, which devotes only a small portion of its budget to mitigation work.

“This is not an issue that can be pushed off to a timeline based solely on politics,” said Steve Frisch, a founding member of the coalition and president of the Sierra Business Council. “Fire happens whether we want it to or not.”

After a series of destructive wildfires in Northern California and the 2017 Thomas fire in Southern California, the state legislature began to explicitly focus on funding wildfire mitigation.

In 2018, lawmakers directed $200 million per year of cap-and-invest funds to wildfire mitigation projects.

As the Woolsey fire in Southern California and the Camp fire in Paradise raged later that fall, Trump accused the state of “gross mismanagement” of forest lands and threatened to cut off federal funds unless it was corrected.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislature, with a significant budget surplus, began earmarking even more funds, leading to a peak of $1.1 billion in wildfire mitigation investments during the 2021-2022 fiscal year.

After the surplus dwindled, the legislature opted in 2024 to put a $10-billion climate bond in front of voters — $1.5 billion of which was dedicated specifically for wildfire mitigation work.

Newsom has since pointed to this high state funding to call on the federal government to step up its own investments into forest management work.

The federal government manages 57% of all forests in the state. While the U.S. Forest Service spent $3.1 billion mitigating wildfire conditions in the state over the last few years, California spent $4.3 billion, according to the California Forest Resilience and Wildfire Task Force.

However, the state has already allocated about $600 million of the climate bond’s wildfire mitigation pot for the 2024-2025 and current fiscal years. The latest budget proposal would allocate more than $300 million for this upcoming fiscal year. While many advocates support allocating the money quickly, it leaves little for future years.

Once that money is spent, California has to pay off the $10 billion bond with interest. The result is an estimated price tag of $16 billion, paid in roughly $400 million increments every year, for 40 years, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

As for the cap-and-invest funds, a fraught months-long debate at the California Air Resources Board on how to extend the program beyond 2030 resulted in a compromise that will cut the revenue it generates in half, the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates.

Since other projects get priority — including $1 billion every year for California’s high-speed rail project — the new proposal would “likely leave no funding” for the wildfire and forest resilience line item, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found.

Cal Fire still holds a modest annual budget for wildfire mitigation work. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the agency had $500 million for forest management and fire prevention that was not directly tied to cap-and-invest or the bond — up from about $65 million two decades prior.

As for the federal government, independent analyses by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NPR found that Forest Service wildfire mitigation work is on the decline amid federal staffing cuts. The Forest Service claims the decrease in work was primarily due to poor weather conditions for activities like prescribed burns and staff being occupied with firefighting.

Both the state and federal government’s investments pale in comparison to the spending of California’s investor-owned utilities. In 2025 alone, the utilities planned to spend more than $9.2 billion on preventing their equipment from sparking the next devastating wildfire, primarily funded by Californians’ electricity bills.

Times staff writer Hayley Smith contributed to this report.