Who knew you could stoop so low while flying so high?
Southwest Airlines put together a humorous video that shares the most “discouraged but crafty” ways passengers have kept the seats next to them open throughout a flight. Southwest does not have seat assignments.
Showing a passenger seated at the window — sprawling his legs across an empty row — he first demonstrates “the hat trick.”
No, the man didn’t score three goals at a hockey game
He instead cleverly put a hat on his hand and held it over the empty seat in his row at a smart angle so that those passing by — distracted by the chaos of boarding — will just keep moving on, thinking the seat is taken already.
The second method induces some reverse psychology.
Southwest advises that certain passengers will put on an overtly happy face and obnoxiously welcome someone to sit next to them for a lengthy duration in the air.
The sinister tactic is dubbed “the encouraging seat pat.”
Approach No. 3 is rather forthcoming — “the upfront decline.”
“Can I sit here?” a passenger asks, to which the man responds flatly: “Oh, no.”
Fourth, and perhaps most dastardly, is “the fake breakup.”
The man phones in a phony call to his significant other and begins the hysterics that he’s been broken up with and will be an inconsolable mess for the next “two hours and 43 minutes.”
The Post has reached out to Southwest Airlines for comment.
Although the plane purveyor’s tongue-firmly-in-cheek advice ended there, plenty of commenters on TikTok passed along their own useful strategies as well.
“You forgot the ‘eat a giant bag of Funions’ ” trick,” wrote Chelsea Cangelosi, to which Southwest replied, “That’s just evil.”
“You forgot the ‘let me unpack my whole carry on in these seats’ troupe,” added McKenna Morin.
“I was on a flight last week and the lady in the row across from me was pretending to throw up in the puke bag during the whole boarding process,” claimed user Sara Ann.
While Southwest is poking fun at the matter, there have been plenty of recent instances where passengers took inflight behavior well above cruising altitude.
Earlier this month — on a Southwest flight — a man threw another passenger in a headlock after he allegedly bumped into his wife in an aggressive manner on a flight from Dallas to Phoenix.
A recent, vicious dispute over seating resulted in a man being tasered on board a Jetstar flight from Perth to Melbourne in Australia.
Last November, an unruly passenger — whose nature of disruption remains undisclosed — also grounded a Southwest flight.