The Flyer was shocked after two people mistook the emergency exit for the bathroom – and tried to open it

It’s not something that happens often on a flight, so for it to happen twice, on two separate occasions, left me in complete shock.

I was recently on an SA Airlink flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town, sitting at the front of the plane when an elderly man tried to open the plane’s emergency exit door mid-flight.

At first I had no idea what was going on.

I was sitting on the left side of the plane and the drama was unfolding against the wall in front of me.

I had my headphones on but was quickly distracted when I noticed the passengers around me getting agitated and instructing a man to “stop”.

I grabbed my headphones, leaned over and noticed a man pulling the handle of the exit door. My heart dropped immediately.

“What are you doing?” a passenger sitting in front of me frantically asked the man, to which he calmly replied, “where’s the toilet?”

Wild but true – he mistook the exit door for the toilet.

So many questions were going through my head: ‘Has this person never flown before?’ ‘How come they don’t know the difference between an airplane door and a toilet door?’.

The same thing happened on the way back on the same airline.

Another man thought he was opening the toilet door.

What was going on? I mean, surely the window above the lever was a clue to what was on the other side of that door.

In both cases the flight attendants were on the other side of the plane serving food and drinks, so other passengers had to intervene.

Professor Doug Drury, head of aviation at Central Queensland University, said first-time flyers were the best explanation for a mistake like this.

“When we look at the toilet at the back of the plane, our eyes are drawn to the complex design of the gallery and not to the toilets that stand at the entrance to the gallery,” he said. “When the exit door is the only thing you see, that would confuse any first-time flyer.”

It’s rare but it happens.

In July this year, a woman for the first time accidentally opened the emergency door of an Air China flight while trying to find the toilet.

The plane was waiting on the tarmac when she went to the back of the plane to use the restroom.

When she opened the door, the evacuation slide unfolded in front of her causing the flight to be cancelled, according to the Daily Mail.

Meanwhile, in 2018, an Indian man, also a first-time flier, caused panic in the air when he tried to open an airplane door, mistaking it for a toilet.

He was traveling in a GoAir flight from New Delhi to Patna when he was caught by the crew.

When fellow passengers asked him what he was doing, he told them he “had to use the bathroom urgently and proceeded to pull the exit door,” The Telegraph, a Kolkata-based newspaper, quoted an airport official as saying.

“In all this pandemonium prevailed and he restrained himself and finally surrendered to us.

“He said the confusion happened because he had boarded a flight for the first time in his life,” Mohammad Sanowar Khan told the newspaper.

An airline spokesman said the man would not have been able to open the door anyway due to the air pressure in the cabin.

Drury explained that the exit door on an aircraft cannot open above 10,000 feet in altitude as the cabin is pressurized at 8,000 feet.

“So when we’re at 35,000 feet, we’re not feeling zero gravity and we’re breathing normal air,” he said.

“Furthermore, the pressure above 10,000 feet means that the exit door, like the rest of the aircraft, has 600 lbs per square inch keeping it safe.”

So what is the solution?

Drury said the industry could continue to use curtains to block the gallery or even a sliding door for the crew.

“However this adds more weight to the aircraft which burns more fuel, which is more cost, which means higher ticket prices.”