Viral Video Shows Woman Smoking Cigarette on a Full Airplane

A video on TikTok showing a woman smoking a cigarette on a Spirit Airlines flight has amassed over 11 million views and 28,900 comments since being posted last week. The passenger, who's been dubbed a "Karen" by the internet, was aboard a crowded early morning flight when she decided to light up.

The incident occurred while the plane was taxiing near a gate in Fort Lauderdale, Florida last week. The viral video was posted by Alexa Majdalawi who goes by @heyalexa_nah on TikTok. The text on the screen reads "only on a spirit flight: girl lit up an actual cigarette on the plane in her chair. Here's her getting arrested" as the video shows angry passengers yelling at the woman.

Smoking on airplanes has been illegal since 2000. Passengers who are caught smoking on an aircraft can face up to $4,000 in fines and be arrested.

"Also, this is at 1 am! So......." reads the pinned comment by the creator. Passengers can be heard yelling and recording the incident with their phones as the police board the plane.

"Come get her please bro because she's holding us up!" one passenger can be heard yelling at an officer. "Someone call 911, please get her because they f**ked up our flight."

The video then shows the officers approach the woman as she appears to be pretending to sleep. The police attempt to get the woman's attention as passengers joke about her "acting dead." The police motion for the woman to get up and ask if she has a bag in the overhead. She says yes and the officer begins looking through the bin for her bag as she shakes her head no. He then moves to another overhead bin.

A passenger can be heard saying "she checked her bag" as another one yells, "Her bag is under the plane, take her off." One passenger continues to yell at the officers asking them to remove the woman. The officer seems irritated and looks at the loud passenger as he lowers his face mask.

"I know you don't believe this but we can actually do this without your assistance, so just hold on OK?" the officer sternly says to the passenger in the video.

Viewers were disappointed in the way the police treated the woman who smoked the cigarette versus the loud passenger. "Officer did not pass the vibe check" joked one viewer in the comments. "WHY ARE YALL MAD ABOUT A WOMAN BEING LOUD WHEN THERE WAS LITERALLY ANOTHER WOMAN WITH AN OPEN FLAME ON AN AIRCRAFT!??!?" another viewer points out.

Shortly after, the woman gets out of her seat, stands up in the aisle, and is escorted off the plane by police. As she walks off the plane, a passenger can be heard saying "yay" and another one lightly claps their hands.

"This girl just pulled out a cigarette, just starts smoking and blowing it behind her," @heyalexa_nah explained in a follow-up TikTok. "She was like 'it's been a long day.'" Majdalawi said she was sitting behind the woman and the smoke started affecting her since she is asthmatic and the woman was blowing it directly in her face.

"It's not really fun to have to pull out your inhaler in the middle of a flight with a mask on," she said on TikTok. In a follow-up video, she explained that the woman lied to the flight attendant when she was asked if she smoked on the plane. "So yeah, that was my 1 a.m. experience on Spirit," @heyalexa_nah joked on TikTok. "I'm never flying Spirit again, that's never going to happen."

In a video posted by another passenger on the plane, the woman can be seen with her mask off as she puffs on a cigarette in the dark aircraft. In the video shot by Beatrix Trifonova, Majdalawi can be heard asking the woman to not smoke on the plane. The woman then replies "It's been a long day."

The woman complied with deputies' request to be removed from the plane and was not arrested, Broward County Sheriff's Office told The Miami Herald.

Newsweek reached out to Spirit Airlines for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.