December 29, 2025, 5:15 am | Read time: 4 minutes
Flying around the world in a private jet: What remains an unattainable dream for most people was everyday life for Katharina Chiao-Li Fuchs for a long time. She worked as a flight attendant on a private jet and experienced all sorts of bizarre, but also dangerous and threatening situations. In an interview with TRAVELBOOK, she shares her absurd experiences and stories.
As a career changer, Katharina Chiao-Li Fuchs became a flight attendant on a private jet—until she had enough. Now she regularly shares her experiences on Instagram. And they are quite something. In the TRAVELBOOK interview, she reveals which of her flights she remembers most vividly.
“Why should I be the one to take this flight?!”
One of her most extreme stories? “The money transfer we did in the Congo. They said there was a chance the plane could be shot at,” she recounts in the TRAVELBOOK interview. This absolutely absurd story began with Fuchs receiving a briefing before the flight. It stated: “You will pick up two sultans in Cairo and take them to the Congo, there will be a money transfer, and there is a chance the plane will be shot at when you fly in,” explains the former private jet flight attendant.
Her first reaction: Why should I be the one to take this flight?! The response was something like, “You are simply the best team for it.” In the end, nothing happened; the plane was not shot at. Nevertheless, this trip understandably stayed in her memory. “We waited five hours on the plane for the men. When they came out of the terminal, there was a crowd of men around them, protecting them in case shots were fired.”
Read part 1 of the interview here: Ex-private jet flight attendant: “I was thrown to the predators”
Former Private Jet Flight Attendant: “I Was Thrown to the Wolves”
Why Ryanair Wouldn’t Let Me Sit Next to My 4-Year-Old Daughter
“The mother threw a knife at me”
That wasn’t the only “extreme” flight the former private jet flight attendant experienced. In the top three is also a route where the son of a president was on board. “He was totally drunk and aggressive and threw money in my face,” Katharina Chiao-Li Fuchs recounts. He kept asking her why she wouldn’t date him and harassed her. “I locked myself in the kitchen, but he kicked the door in—luckily, I had already informed the captain, who then came to help.”
A flight that will also remain forever in her memory, because it was the “worst in her life,” was with a super-rich family of 13. “The plane looked really terrible afterward; they were just really antisocial,” Fuchs says. The worst part: Because the service didn’t suit her and wasn’t fast enough, the mother of the family threw a knife at her.
“The kids were cheeky and condescending”
But the former private jet flight attendant didn’t just experience dangerous situations; sometimes they were also peculiar or rather funny. Once, she flew a birthday child from Moscow to Paris. “She was turning eleven or twelve, and the plane was supposed to be decorated with colorful Paris signs everywhere,” she says. She was then supposed to send photos to ensure everything was correctly placed. “Then I got an angry call because Mickey Mouse wasn’t sitting on the master seat.” The highlight was the kids: “They were so cheeky—they didn’t know please or thank you. Kind of funny, but also, well…,” Fuchs recounts.
And a flight she will probably never forget was the one with a nine-year-old child on board. The child did their business between the seats. “The mother then told me to clean it up, and I just thought: no way,” says the former private jet flight attendant. The sad part of the story was that this was probably more of a cry for attention from the child because the parents weren’t interested. “All the kids always had nannies; once there were five kids and six nannies on board.” She was also mostly shocked by the behavior: “The kids were either extremely well-behaved or really cheeky and sometimes condescending. There was nothing in between.”