SpongeBob wishes he could fly like the jellyfish do, but all his attempts to invent a flying machine fail. Then he accidentally leaves his hair dryer by his pants, which inflates them, giving him the buoyancy to fly. He then goes around helping people, earning their admiration, but others start requesting increasingly unnecessary favors, leaving him no time to fly with the jellyfish.

The episode opens with Patchy the Pirate in a live-action segment, lamenting that he lost his VHS copy and setting off to find it using a treasure map. (To promote the episode, Nickelodeon launched an on-air campaign called "SpongeBob's Lost Episode".) But when he finally recovers it, the tape only shows a clip of SpongeBob walking in cycles to techno music before abruptly ending with color bars. Patchy gets angry, thinking that SpongeBob betrayed him, and gets rid of all his SpongeBob merchandise, after which the real animated episode start playing.

In 2007, this episode was adapted into a musical called "SpongeBob SquarePants Live! The Sponge Who Could Fly!"