WWE's Plane Ride From Hell

While WWE wrestlers often have to arrange their own travel for shows in the United States, in addition to paying for their own hotels and rental cars, that isn’t the case for the company’s international tours.

Normally, travelling internationally takes place without any issues, but one instance of the WWE roster travelling together was a complete and utter disaster. 

That fateful flight became known as the Plane Ride from Hell and was very much a recipe for problems with a tired roster, a seven-hour transatlantic flight, and an open bar as WWE travelled from the United Kingdom back to the United States. 

The incidents were numerous and ranged from ribbing to fights to sexual misconduct to something that many feared could potentially cause the aircraft to drop out of the sky at 35,000 feet. It was a nightmare, with the consequences both immediate and long-lasting.

WWE’s UK Tour

The European tour itself was a relatively short one for WWE from May 1 to May 4, comprising three house shows and a pay-per-view. The Raw roster travelled from Cologne, Germany to Glasgow, Scotland, then to Birmingham, England, before ending the excursion across the pond with Insurrextion from London's Wembley Arena.

The WWE roster for the tour included Steve Austin, The Undertaker, The Big Show, Ric Flair, Triple H, Eddie Guerrero, Rob Van Dam, The Hardy Boyz, Brock Lesnar, Scott Hall, Curt Hennig, Booker T, Bradshaw, Crash Holly, Stevie Richards, X-Pac, Justin Credible, Shawn Stasiak, Tommy Dreamer, Spike Dudley, William Regal, Trish Stratus, Molly Holly, Jacqueline, Jazz, Debra, Paul Heyman, Jerry Lawler, Jim Ross and road agents like Fit Finlay, Arn Anderson, John Laurinaitis, and Gerald Brisco, as well as referees, production crew, and management. 

The tour was successful and, following Insurrextion, the company hopped aboard the chartered flight from London to Connecticut in order to make it back in time for Raw on Monday. 

The Flight

There are varying accounts as to who did what on the flight, but across them all, there is a consensus agreement on who the main perpetrators and what their various transgressions were. There is also a strong belief that the free booze and alleged recreational drug use were major factors in the escalation of events.

The flight began innocently enough with some light pranks as Curt Hennig and Scott Hall "tagged" people with shaving cream, while a tipsy Gerald Brisco tried to hug and kiss everyone on board. 

As the liquor flowed and time passed, however, things took a turn for the worse. The actual order of how things happened on the flight isn’t completely clear, but one of the major incidents saw Curt Hennig goad Brock Lesnar into a wrestling match in the aisle, which came only one year after Vince McMahon spent an entire flight trying to take down Kurt Angle. That episode ended when The Undertaker woke up, saw the Olympic gold medallist on top of the CEO and, still in a bit of a slumber, attempted to choke out Angle. 

This time, though, it started with a friendly grapple between Hennig and Lesnar, but the wrestling continued to escalate, and they spilt close to the emergency exit, freaking everybody on board out in the process. This resulted in Lesnar and Mr. Perfect being separated by Fit Finlay, Paul Heyman, and Triple H, amongst others. 

Hennig’s shaving cream partner-in-crime, Scott Hall, meanwhile, became so inebriated that people had to check his pulse to make sure he was still alive. When the plane touched down in the United States, Hall had to be placed into a wheelchair and led through customs, much to the disgust of many in WWE’s upper echelon. 

One of the things that Hall was accused of after the fact was making sexually suggestive comments towards one of the female flight attendants, as was Ric Flair.

The 16-time world champion allegedly removed all of his clothes and walked around in one of his wrestling robes while the plane was in the air, occasionally flashing people on the flight and, according to a lawsuit later filed by two of the flight attendants, forcing them to touch his nether regions. 

Dustin Rhodes - AKA Goldust - meanwhile allegedly harassed a flight attendant while spilling tobacco dip on the carpeted floor. Rhodes then hijacked the plane’s PA system and began drunkenly serenading his ex-wife Terri Runnels with love songs, at which point WWE Head of Talent Relations Jim Ross was forced to intervene and get him to stop singing to the mortified Marlena. 

Another authority figure in Michael Hayes started the flight by hitting Bradshaw on the forehead, which caused the wrestler to bleed from a fresh wound sustained at the previous evening’s pay-per-view. 

Not exactly thrilled with having his clothes covered in claret, the tall Texan promptly knocked Hayes out, according to some reports. Hayes then later very nearly urinated on Linda McMahon in the first-class section of the plane.

After Hayes passed out, X-Pac decided the Fabulous Freebird needed a new look and promptly cut off his ponytail, which he would then pin to a wall backstage at Raw the next day next to a sign that said: "Auction: Freebird Ponytail - Proceeds Benefit Alcoholics Anonymous."

When Dok Hendrix realised he was down a mullet while on his way through customs, he went apoplectic and tried to fight just about everyone who was unfortunate enough to have been on the flight. Nobody ratted on X-Pac, however, as many people felt as though Hayes had ‘deserved it’ for his obnoxious behaviour.

All of that, and possibly more we don’t even know about, happened on that flight and, though it wasn’t the first or last time a group of wrestlers had misbehaved while up in the air, the volume of incidents and the aftermath have seen this plane ride go down in history as one of the more noteworthy trips in WWE history. 

The Aftermath

The events of the flight had major repercussions once Vince McMahon found out about everything. 

Curt Hennig was fired for his part in it all. He would have likely gotten away with the shaving cream pranks, but the repeated fighting with Lesnar, who was a rookie and just trying to stand up for himself, earned him his pink slip, even if the official explanation was that the creative team didn’t have anything for him. 

Scott Hall was also fired, though not for any one specific thing. His conduct leading up to and on the tour had been poor, and the flight was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

Goldust wasn’t fired, but he came close. Dustin Rhodes had heat for some time after the Plane Ride from Hell but he managed to work his way out of it and, by the end of the year, his tag team run with Booker T had been one of the genuine highlights of WWE TV. 

Arn Anderson, Gerald Brisco and Michael Hayes were all reprimanded since they were supposed to be keeping an eye on the roster and instead decided to indulge with them. 

"Stone Cold" Steve Austin was not impressed with Hayes and was notably annoyed with how the flight went, even though he and Debra watched a movie and slept the whole time. There was no heat on Bradshaw or X-Pac, who were both viewed as heroes for their respective efforts.  

There was also no heat on Ric Flair, since he put his nether regions away when JR asked him to and his antics were seen internally as just "Flair being Flair." 

The two flight attendants who claimed to be on the receiving end of the unwanted sexual advances filed a lawsuit against the company two years later, citing the ‘extreme and outrageous’ behaviour of Flair, Rhodes and Hall. Flair denied any wrongdoing for his part, and WWE eventually settled out of court. 

Jim Ross later wrote about the Plane Ride from Hell in his Ross Report column and spoke about his disappointment in how the unsavoury scene unfolded, claiming that alcohol would not be provided on future chartered flights. 

In the end, though the Plane Ride from Hell was certainly serious and affected WWE and their business, it did not cause too much long-lasting damage to the company, likely due to the standards in society and the industry as a whole at that time.