It was an inflight face-off.
A celebrity couple who thought they had the “best” seats on the plane were mortified after realizing their seating arrangement was anything but that.
A clip of the mile-high mishap currently boasts nearly 20 million views on TikTok.
The couple in question were Real Madrid star Sergio Carrallo and his wife Caroline Stanbury, who stars on the “Real Housewives of Dubai.”
Carrallo explained in the caption that their assistant “booked 1A and 1B” on the undisclosed flight, leading them to believe they had “the best seats on the plane.”
The pair quickly realized that wasn’t the case after they arrived and noticed there was no one behind them. Instead, the soulmates’ seat backs were against the bulkhead, preventing them from reclining even an inch, as seen in the footage.
“We got the best seats in the plane,” a bemused Carrallo snarks in the clip. “Nothing goes back.”
And that was just the tip of the inflight iceberg.
The soccer star then pans his phone to the rest of the plane, revealing that they were actually “facing the cabin” as if seated in a flight attendant’s jump seat.
Social media was understandably freaked out by the claustrophobic and awkward configuration.
“The fact that everyone is staring I can’t,” exclaimed one mortified commenter, while another wrote, “Absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the camera flip.”
“Staring the entire plane down is crazy,” said a third.
Others said their seating arrangement looked as if they were conducting a Q&A session at 30,000 feet.
“There’s my absolute worst nightmare and then there’s this,” quipped one TikTok wit.
“Why do those seats even exist?!” inquired one incredulous viewer, to which Carrallo replied, “Tell me about it.”
Interestingly, aft-facing airline seats aren’t as unusual as one might think. Airlines ranging from United Airlines to British Airways offer this face-to-face orientation in business class.
According to the online travel site The Points Guy, many airlines opt for those seats so they can squeeze more of them into the business class cabin, effectively prioritizing space maximization over privacy.
Paradoxically, the seats also cost more money, which is why airlines are reluctant to install them.
They’re also safer than their backward-facing counterparts:
Richard Snyder, a former University of Michigan transportation safety researcher, told Smithsonian magazine in October 2009 that crash protection afforded by aft-facing seats is “supported by over half a century of experience.”
The article referenced a 1952 edition of Naval Aviation News, which explained that “passengers in Navy transport planes have ten-fold better chances of coming out of crashes alive, thanks to backward-facing seats.”
While this configuration might save passenger lives, it might not do the same for their dignity.
In July, an Illinois passenger detailed her mortifying experience aboard a European flight — in which she had to sit directly across from another passenger so that their knees were nearly touching.
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