Mile-High Club

Hugh Dennis (as Nicholas Sarkozy, President of France): Sorry we're late your Majesty, Carla and I were stacking over Gatwick - I had to come around three times before I'd made my final approach!

—Mock the Week

Maybe it's the lower air pressure (some claim that orgasms are improved). Maybe it's travelling at 500 mph. Maybe it's just a desire to do what few people have ever done. The complimentary wine probably plays a part. It's unclear, but sometimes people just like to have sex on aircraft. Usually in the toilet, which is not exactly the most romantic location on the planet (nor spacious on most airplanes), but is one of the few private places.

The Other Wiki has an article on this. There are dedicated companies for this sort of thing.

For the stage beyond the Mile-High Club, see Zero-G Spot. Compare Three-Way Sex in terms of sexual rubicons all men are supposed to aspire to.

No real life examples, please; this is All The Tropes, not Tropes After Dark.

Examples of Mile-High Club include:

Abridged Series

• From Avatar: The Abridged Series: In Episode 11, Sokka is implied to have done this with Yue. On Appa.

Anime and Manga

• In Vassalord, Rayflo and Charley do the vampiric equivalent of this — no sex, but lots of very suggestive blood-sucking and groping.

Comic Books

• Done without a plane by Wonder Woman and Superman, in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Superman does her so hard he rams her into the ground causing massive planet-wide Earthquakes, with the act of him climaxing actually causing the 6 sextillion ton planet Earth TO MOVE.

Wonder Woman: Mr. Kent, you could populate a planet!

• Two passengers joining the Mile-High Club has unexpected consequences for a flight in the XXXenophile story "Hoisters".
• Miracleman has some planeless flying sex.
• Ramba has anonymous sex with a stranger in an aeroplane bathroom in "A Perfect Hit".
• In season eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy and Angel fly around having lots of sex after getting super powers.
• Cherry Comics: Cherry has sex in a hot air balloon in one story.

Fan Works

• In Weekend at Hisao's, Hisao and Shizune, flying back from Lilly's wedding, have sex in the on-board lavatory. Hisao complains that it's too cramped to enjoy himself, and they get caught by the stewardess.

Film

• The stoner couple in Snakes on a Plane, who of course die for their drug-abusing, sex-having ways.
• James Bond, who probably became a member shortly after the first time he got on a plane after his testicles dropped.
  • As seen in Moonraker, Bond is a member of the 300-kilometer-high club.
• Airplane! II: the Sequel. A woman seduces a man by saying she doesn't want to die a virgin. Later, she tries the same trick again with another man, and a number of men are shown lined up waiting to have sex with her. At one point, she does the same thing with a donkey.
• Subverted in Red Eye. While Rippner locks himself and Lisa in the bathroom and gives her a smackdown and a Hannibal Lecture, the flight attendants assume that they're having sex. In fact, the sexual subtext makes the scene all the more disturbing. Though he walks out of there perfectly composed and smug, she's terrified and nearly in tears—and it's only made more creepy when you find out that Lisa was raped by a Knife Nut like Jackson before the two even met.
• Puma Man and his Shallow Love Interest.

Crow: (to the tune of the BGM) Now, get going, to boff in the air!

• Implied at the end of Eurotrip.
• 1941. Ice Queen Donna Stratton turns into a raging nymphomaniac whenever she gets into the air. Knowing this, Handsome Lech Captain Loomis Birkhead is willing to risk death (he flunked flying school) to get her up in an aircraft. Just as he's finally mastered the plane (and her) they're interrupted in the act by a mad pilot in a P-40 Warhawk who thinks they're Japs.
• Frequent-flyers Ryan and Alex compare Mile-High Club notes in Up in the Air.
• The film Nothing In Common starts with Tom Hanks' character engaged in this with a flight attendant.

Literature

• Arthur and Fenchurch, sans plane.
• In Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Tucker Case crashes a plane he's piloting while having sex and gets blacklisted from flying in the United States.
• One of the subplots in Small World by David Lodge involves the ridiculously competitive Howard Ringbaum trying to convince his wife Thelma to have sex with him on an aeroplane so he can join the Mile High Club; apparently labouring under the misaprehension that the Mile High Club is an actual organisation.

Live-Action TV

• CSI: Sara Sidle. She claimed the experience is overrated.
• Brothers and Sisters: Robert and Kitty McAllister. They had a private aircraft and the entire cabin for it.
• While not shown, it is probably safe to assume Captain Jack Harkness of Torchwood and Doctor Who is a member. In fact, it's almost certain.
• 24: A terrorist known only as "Mandy" and a deceased reporter.
• Just Shoot Me: Jack Gallo. Member since 1963.
• Joked about in Spin City, where Mike and Caitlin simply talk in the airplane's bathroom. When they leave, the other passengers assume they have joined the mile high club, and the men proceed to give Mike high fives.
• Friends. Monica and Chandler plan to meet in the bathroom on their flight back to New York from London, but Joey thwarts them by striking up a conversation with Chandler.
• The 2009-10 V in "We Can't Win" (s01e08). Actually in space, but with gravity.
• A Leverage episode entitled The Mile High Job averts this. No sex on a plane, although there were plenty of other shenanigans.
• Danny Blue from Hustle with two airline stewardesses. In "Gold Mine" he makes a remark about a soap dispenser almost putting out a stewardess's eye.
• Drs. Rodney McKay and Jennifer Keller are implied to have joined in a private jet at the end of the Stargate Atlantis episode "Brain Storm."
• Married... with Children. While skydiving, Bud's date Kara has sex with Biff, the skydiving instructor after Bud's pushed out of the plane in "The Mystery of Skull Island."
• The MTV show Fur TV had the Handsome Lech (well, a sock pupet, but all the ladies treat him as such) propose this to whomever happens to have a hundred million dollars. "A plane filled with woman catering to your every need, 30.000 feet above any legal restrictions. I call it 'The Flying Fuck'."
• It is reported in Red Dwarf that an alternative, wealthy version of Dave Lister would meet his end at the age of 98 in a plane crash... caused by him losing control of the plane while having sex with his fourteenth wife.
• Even death can occur as shown in 1000 Ways to Die. The couple are having sex in the airplane lavatory until a heavy turbulence tosses them in the confined space cracking their skulls and killing them both.
• Banacek and his Girl of the Week in "A Million the Hard Way". Even referenced by name.
• Referred to in an episode of Frasier: When Niles was young he went to Paris, and a woman on the plane asked if he'd like to join the Mile-High Club. He didn't want to admit he was unfamiliar with the term, so he said he didn't fly often enough for that to be worthwhile.

Music

• Nickleback's song Rock Star.
• Edguy's hilarious "Lavatory Love Machine."
• From the song "Do Bears" by Rowan Atkinson and Kate Bush (originally oerformed at Comic Relief 1986 and later included on one of the Not the Nine O'Clock News albums):

Rowan: I met her in the first class lounge of a jumbo jet
It was love at first sight, Romeo and Juliet
Kate: He looked pretty rich and I was down on m' luck
So I charged him a fortune for a flying fu...
Rowan: ...for crying out loud!

Stand-Up Comedy

• Ron White joked that instead of the "Mile High Club", he's a member of the "Mile Ahead Club", which is where you do it behind a Cracker Barrel billboard.

Video Games

• The mission "Mile High Club" from Call of Duty 4 has nothing to do with this trope, but it does involve another variety of getting screwed on an airplane.
• A weird example in Metal Gear Solid 4 has Naomi and Otacon having sex, in a stationary helicopter, inside a flying plane. Er?
• in Just Cause 2 has a literal mile high club. An aircraft carrier supported by two blimps with dancing girls and evil bartenders.

Web Comics

• Ray from Achewood briefly ran such a business.
• Does it count if you are on the ground but over a mile up from the sea level? This Queen of Wands strip does not really give an answer...
  • No.
    • If this were true most everyone from Denver would be a member. And that's just not right.
• Out There: Implied, subtly, here.

Western Animation

• In the episode of Family Guy where Lois becomes a flight attendant, Peter tries to convince her to join the Mile High Club. It doesn't quite work.

Peter Well, at least one of us is in the Mile High Club!

Other

• There is a t-shirt that said "Million Mile High Club" and had a picture of astronauts having sex. It should be pointed out that no man has traveled more than 300,000 miles "high", the distance to the Moon and no woman has left Low Earth Orbit (700 miles "high"), but "Three-Hundred-Thousand Mile High Club" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Real Life

• Lawrence Sperry, inventor of the autopilot, is generally recognized as the founder of the Mile High Club. He was purportedly teaching a (married—and not to him) woman to fly when the plane crashed from an altitude of 500 feet; when he and his paramour were discovered in the nude, he claimed that they had lost their clothing in the crash.
• The pilots doing this resulted in this Darwin Award nomination
• There was a possible case of this occurring shortly after the invention of the hot air balloon.
  • Specifically, Stephen Fry on QI read this out from an 18th-century wager book:

"Lord Cholmondely has given two guineas to Lord Derby, to receive 500 guineas whenever his lordship 'plays hospitals' with a woman in a balloon 1,000 yards from the Earth." For "plays hospitals with" I think you can insert your own-- word."

• The Airbus A380 is so spacious that Singapore Airlines (and possibly others) have individual cabins in first class. With double beds. Cabin staff have had to ask people to stop having sex because the cabins are not soundproof and other passengers were being disturbed.
• Ralph Fiennes was caught leaving a bathroom on a Qantas flight with a female flight attendant. She later confessed and was promptly fired.
• One couple did it while skydiving.