Pilot pulls zero-gravity ‘prank’ on sleeping pals midflight: ‘People getting floated’
What a couple of airheads.
A pilot is facing backlash online after pulling a controversial “zero gravity” prank on several female passengers, as seen in an Instagram video with 45 million views.
“Zero gravity is safe and a fun type of thing to do with friends when done correctly,” pilot and flying instructor John Robert Nelson wrote in the clip’s caption.
The flyboy regularly posts clips detailing his time in the friendly skies for his over 100,000 followers on Instagram.
For his latest stunt, Nelson decided to seemingly punk two female passengers by making them float in flight.
In the footage, the two headset-sporting gal pals are seen seemingly sleeping without seatbelts in the back of a small aircraft.
All of a sudden, the jokester maneuvers the plane such that the pair rise upwards out of their seats, and hit the jet’s ceiling a la the floating scene in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
The clip concludes with the two women floating back down to their seats while laughing uproariously over their ridiculous predicament.
For the uninitiated, Zero-G environments are created when pilots fly a plane in a parabolic arc, in which they point the nose of the plane upward and then downward after reaching a certain altitude.
When the plane hits the central peak of the parabola, passengers experience weightlessness for around 20 seconds, similar to an astronaut in space.
Nelson insisted in the clip’s caption that the levitation trick was “fun” and “safe” and urged people to follow him if they wanted to see “more people getting floated.”
Needless to say, the Instagram-verse felt like he didn’t appreciate the gravity of subjecting passengers to a Zero-G environment.
“No seatbelts in a plane is actually insane,” said one commenter.
Another listed potential mishaps that could occur due to the prank, which they claimed included everything from head injuries to inadvertently interfering with the flight controls should the passengers fly to the front.
“Stuff pilots do for attention that can make the rest of us look stupid if something bad happens,” the critic fumed.
However, many viewers felt that the stunt was clearly fake and that so-called victims were in on it.
“So many Karen ‘pilots’ in here,” scoffed one. “Not dangerous and staged. They knew it was coming. Just having a little fun. Get a life.”
“The fact that they immediately started smiling … clickbait lol,” declared another.
Others accused Nelson of violating Federal Aviation Regulations, which he addressed in a follow-up video on Instagram.
In it, the pilot claimed that the allegations of “careless or reckless operation” of an aircraft — one of many several violations of which he was accused — were erroneous given that he wasn’t “endangering” the women’s lives or jeopardizing the airplane.
“They’re simply floating up, floating down, I’m not overstressing the aircraft,” Nelson declared.
He also argued that their lack of seatbelts was fine, citing the fact that belts are only required for taxi, takeoff, and landing.
Lastly, Nelson refuted the notion that he liked to break FAA rules just to “create content,” claiming: “The reason they’re able to have fun in the back is because they know I’m being safe about it. I’m making sure we have plenty of altitude and that there’s no traffic around us.”
“I like to be safe and have fun and I hope you guys can see that in the video,” he said.
