It's a natural thing to feel relieved when your plane lands and it's even more obvious to thank the pilot for making you land safely and it would definitely be a nicer thing to clap for him. But guess what? That's a matter of public shame now. Over a period of 200 years, since the Wright Brothers took the first flight in the 1800s, the world has come to treat flying as a run of the mill task. Lately, people are shaming each other over the proverb, "clapping on planes" for various instances like:

"People who [do a disagreeable thing] are the same people who clap when the plane lands." Sometimes there's even a variation like "Imagine you meet the love of your life and then find out they clap on planes." And then there's a message of dismissal: "Good morning to everyone except the people who clap when the airplane lands."

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How did the world come to shame clapping on planes?

The truth is no one seems to know. The origin of the aforementioned saying has been thoroughly searched and debated on sites like Quora, Reddit, and Airliners.net. Though there is a difference in opinions, there is no clear answer as of now. Daniel Levine, a travel trends expert told a media publication that the people who clap on planes are basically fearful fliers or happy nationalists who celebrate on landing. After a lot of digging, it was noted in the work of the Museum of Flight, that the first recorded case of landing and clapping came in a Cincinnati Enquirer story in 1948. It mentioned an American Airlines flight with a malfunction that involved the landing gear. The flight ultimately landed safely, and all of the passengers clapped their hands in thankful relief.

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Clapping on planes: A lack of sophistication?

Likewise, it is noted as an common phenomenon by pilots and flight attendees to find passengers fearful when a flight undergoes turbulence. This fear gives rise to the feeling of thankfulness due to which the passengers clap for the flight's successful landing. The previously mentioned travel expert, Levine wrote about a "seemingly spontaneous ovation that often accompanies an aircraft's safe return to terra firma" in 1997 for the International Herald Tribune and did not praise the practice. He said that such a gesture indicates a lack of sophistication.

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Many support "clapping on planes"

However, many frequent travelers take the opposite approach. Earlier in September, "Hamilton" creator Lin-Manuel Miranda tweeted a video of himself giving a round of applause as soon as a plane landed with the message: "How you find out if you're the only Latino on the flight." Many people responded to the video assuming that there were travelers who were German, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese, Jamaican, Polish, Israeli, etc., especially if they were landing at their home airports. While few claimed to be clappers themselves, many said they were familiar with the practice from their own travel history.

Even airlines acknowledged the phenomenon by releasing a video celebrating the tradition of the landing clap in Puerto Rico. Clapping upon touchdown was part of the spirit of the airline as people get very excited as they're about to land, and one way of showing that enthusiasm is to applaud said a spokeswoman for Israeli carrier El Al to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2013. Adding his conclusion to the saying, Levine, the travel expert said that it has become a universal expression that can be shared cross-culturally. In that way, it's kind of nice, he added.

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