Every time I fly from New York to Florida, I witness a miracle. Thirty of the 150 people getting on my jet at LaGuardia Airport do so via wheelchairs. Now, some callous people might say these folks just want to board first. I, however, am certain they really can’t walk -- at least not until they’re miraculously cured somewhere in the skies over America. By the time we touch down in Fort Lauderdale, they can walk--praise the Lord! All of them leap up, crowd the cabin door and want to be the first off the airliner--probably so they can tell their relatives about the miracle.

            You see all sorts of strange things when you fly an airliner for a living. For instance, we’ve grown accustomed to the disappearance of silverware and plates, but every so often our fire extinguishers, crash axes, life vests, toilet seats and even portable oxygen tanks disappear as well. Our passengers profess to be too honest to steal our vital safety and hygiene materials, so there must be a miniature Bermuda Triangle that sucks these items into another universe.

            Evidently the black hole works in reverse, too, spitting into my airliner visitors from many strange universes--such as a creature of the planet Flush a few years back. Just as the DC-9 was leaving the gate we couldn’t help but notice three inches of blue toilet water seeping onto airplane’s floor and sloshing against the radio rack. The passenger, whom I later nicknamed the “Lady of the Lake,” had apparently taken off one of those June Allison adult urine catchers, stuck in a first-class toilet and flushed.

            Unfortunately, if you put an adult diaper and an aircraft toilet, it jams the valve so the toilet doesn’t know when it’s finished flushing. It just keeps pumping out blue water until the tank run dry. This female alien had also spent time on the planet Clueless: After we gently reminded her to never pull that trick again, she repeated the procedure 35,000 ft.--twice. Surf’s up!

Everybody talks about passengers having sex on airline flights.

Passengers who board the “nookie train” when they fly are usually quiet and do it in the bathrooms. I have no idea how, considering the confinement of the lavs. For those of you flying solo, here is another clue: vibrators counts portable electronic devices and must be turned off before takeoff and landing.

            It’s the more obnoxious passenger activities to catch a flight crew’s attention--the fistfights, running through the aisles naked, peeing on the beverage cart, things like that. Also, singers bother me. One guy was holding up a can of tomato juice and crooning to it. He loved that tomato juice, so I told him to take it to the lav.

            Passengers who are actively weirding everybody out still stake their little claims to bizarreness. Some people wear their headphones with the volume turned up so high that the window shake and I’ve seen passengers change into their jammies for those long all night flights. Others carry around entire shoulders of country ham to “eat later”.

            Soon passengers will be setting their ears on fire. A friend sent me a copy of an advertisement sure to catch on with our intergalactic visitors. “Ear coning,” it maintains, “is a safe and simple remedy for relieving pressure in the ears.”

Just follow these instructions:

Place two long tapered cones in your ears.

Light them.

Watch the fun!

            I know that some dark and stormy night I’ll peer back from the cockpit and catch sight of 300 smoldering ears. I don’t know whether earwax is flammable, but I sure as Hell know from personal experience that ear hair is (don’t ask). I don’t want to see entire jumbo jets brought down by flaming auditory canals, so please don’t smoke ‘em-- even if you got ‘em.