Ed Sheeran has admitted to sobbing on a recent flight but he’s not alone – here’s why we all like to cry on planes

ED Sheeran is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, pouring out emotional tracks onstage every night on his world tours.

But even he was a little shocked when he started bawling on a plane recently, while watching an –flight movie.

The star revealed in an interview with Capital FM recently that he started crying at the end of the film Forrest Gump – in full view of the other passengers.

He said: “I cried watching Forrest Gump on a plane, it was at the end when Jenny dies.

“When you’re jet-lagged and at 10,000ft, you haven’t slept and you’re a little bit emotional anyway because you’re going away for a long time and it just set me off.”

Ed isn’t the only passenger to shed a few tears up in the sky though – it turns out everyone cries more easily on a plane.

Virgin Atlantic even started to issue warnings before some of their in-flight movies a few years ago because it became such a problem.

In research carried out by the airline, 41 per cent of male travellers admitted that they had at some point “buried themselves in blankets to hide tears in their eyes from other passengers."

There are several reasons that people become more emotionally sensitive in the air though - and it's not just because they've sunk a few G&Ts from the free booze trolley.

For starters, the lower air pressure in the cabin changes passengers’ mood, personality, behaviour and
cognitive functioning.

People are so easily stressed in the air that airlines have even made the seat covers blue in an effort to calm the atmosphere in the cabin.

But it turns out there is another reason that you might cry – you think it will make other passengers like you.

Ad Vingerhoets, professor of social and behavioural sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands told The Atlantic: “It’s the biological equipment used by infants to maintain proximity to their caregivers.”

The other reason is simply that busy adults don’t usually have time to just sit and think, as they are usually rushing from place to place.

While the tests weren’t carried out on planes, a report called “Grieving while driving” found that people save their grieving for when they got behind the wheel “because that is when they have the time and privacy to think and feel.”