But the celebrations on the nine-hour flight Wednesday quickly turned ugly when one passenger, whom police have identified only as a 41-year-old man, reportedly had too much to drink.
"He had a lot of mini bottles with him, he had a mickey with him, too, because he was pouring other people glasses," said Michael Packham, 34, who was sitting a few rows behind the man.
Mr. Packham, visiting Canadian family, said the man was stumbling up and down the aisles, stepping on people's feet and accidentally hitting people over the head as he tried to give high-fives to strangers.
"People kept trying to restrain him, but he kept getting back up," Mr. Packham said.
About six hours into the flight, passengers told The Globe and Mail, the man finally lay down in the washroom corridor between economy and business class, where he turned blue.
Passenger Vsevolod Timofeev said someone yelled to see whether a doctor was on board. The man died before the plane landed.
Peel Police are treating the death as suspicious. An autopsy was scheduled to be performed yesterday, but the results were not made public.
Although deaths on board flights are relatively rare, drunken passengers are not that uncommon, according to Ramon Lopez, who writes a weekly newsletter called Air Safety Week.
"You can't drink anything you don't buy on the airplane, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen," he said.
Although data on reports of drunkenness weren't immediately available, Mr. Lopez said such high-profile incidents make the news regularly.
"You'll get it from time to time," he said.
Russian media have reported that drunken passengers are involved in hundreds of on-board incidents each year on Russian airlines.
Among those was an incident in July of 2004, when Aeroflot said three male flight attendants got drunk and beat up a passenger who complained about poor service on a flight from Moscow to the west Siberian town of Nizhnevartovsk.
Anne Cumming, a community college instructor on Vancouver Island, said she experienced something similar on board an Aeroflot plane from Moscow to Bangkok in February.
"There was a fistfight where people were pummelling one another and other people were pulling them off. Still other people were cowering," the 54-year-old said.
"The two men throwing up on the floor, they were drinking out of a bottle straight. ... And some men in front, they were sitting in the aisles talking loudly to one another. It was quite obvious they were very drunk."
Ms. Cumming said she felt "vulnerable because it seems nobody has any ability to do anything about it."
Aeroflot officials did not return several calls seeking comment yesterday.