Joel Chusid’s Airline Corner (July 2011)

Guest Editor Joel Chusid

Guest Editor Joel Chusid

Baby on Board – Not!

There has long been discussion on creating family sections on airliners to restrict the antics and noise of children to a single cabin or part thereof, leaving those adults traveling childless to enjoy the flight in peace. Well, Malaysian Airlines has skipped this step and gone directly to creating a baby-free zone in the first class compartments of its Boeing 747s. Passengers, who have paid dearly for a premium class ticket, will not be permitted to travel with infants in First Class. I suppose kids can still travel in business class and of course, economy. So peace and quiet will have a high price tag to and from Kuala Lumpur!

Pilferage In-Flight

Pilferage, of the rifling of people’s checked luggage and removing valuable items, is a problem for airlines as it’s usually difficult to determine where the theft took place. In the following case, it was obvious.  Brinks loaded three sacks containing over a million and a half dollars in currency on an Air Antilles ATR-42 turboprop plane from Guadeloupe to Saint Martin, a forty minute hop. A security guard seated in the cabin accompanied the shipment, which was in the aft cargo compartment.  After takeoff, a passenger went to the lavatory, claiming he felt ill. He spent most of the flight there where, so it was later learned, that he actually removed panels and accessed and cargo area and pocketed whatever cash he could within the time constraint. A fellow passenger, fearing for his health, summoned the flight attendant and the pilot called ahead to have an ambulance waiting. When the plane landed, the man felt miraculously better and walked off the plane and through the airport without being stopped. The sacks were $237,000 lighter, not bad for forty minutes’ work. An inside job?

Pilferage Post-Flight

Ah, but here’s a real inside job. There had been reports of pilferage from baggage on buses operating from the Girona (Spain) Airport to Barcelona. Laptops, GPS units and other valuables would mysteriously disappear. Police finally apprehended the culprits who used a rather ingenious method. One would buy a bus ticket from the airport and check a large and small bag on the bus which were placed in the lower baggage compartment. The other, a contortionist, would pack himself into the larger bag. Enroute, he would get out of the large bag, open and rifle through passenger luggage, stow the booty in the small bag, and then pack himself up again. Upon arrival, the partner in crime would retrieve the two bags and no one was the wiser. One day an alert bus driver noticed a passenger struggling with a heavy bag, which turned out to contain a large, nearly six-foot sweaty man, in possession of tools and the pair was caught red-handed.

Flamingo FOD

Airport workers know what FOD is, otherwise known as “foreign object debris” which means anything on a runway or taxiway that can damage an aircraft. In this case, FOD, although technically inanimate, refers to Ringo the Flamingo, who managed to shut down a runway at the Manchester, England Airport for some five hours, holding up flights. A variety of tactics were employed to shoo the bird away from the airport but were unsuccessful. No one knows where the bird came from as none had been reported missing, and pink flamingos are hardly native to central England.

Kite Alert

Of course, birds can damage airplanes in the air, but in this case it was a kite flying that caused a nuisance over the Taixian Airport in Liaoning Province, China and caused it to close for four hours, delaying ten flights. Why it took authorities four hours to find the person flying the kite was not stated.  While it didn’t cause any delays, other strange things can happen at airports. A main swimming naked in the waterway adjacent to the fuel farm at JFK International Airport on a hot July day was arrested for trespassing and sent for a psychiatric evaluation.

Unexpected Things on a Plane

Snakes, rats and all sort of other critters that find their way on a plane, seem to be creeping into the news of late. Speaking of creeping, imagine Jeff Ellis’s shock, when he awoke on an Alaska Airlines flight from Seattle to Anchorage to find something making its way up his arm. He assumed it was a spider, brushed it off, and then it started crawling up his elbow; suddenly he felt a sting. Ellis and his girlfriend managed to snag the writhing creature, and a flight attendant stuffed it into a plastic bag. While not usually fatal, like a bee sting, this can cause some people to go into anaphylactic shock, a serious condition. A doctor on board told him it was unlikely, but he had to wait thirty minutes to be sure. EMTs met the flight upon landing, but as scorpions are rare in Alaska, they had no experience with it and had to search for information online. Alaska Airlines believes the scorpion boarded in Austin, where the flight had originated, and they graciously compensated Mr. Ellis for his trouble.

Things on a Plane Down Under

But Australia is where problems with animals and airplanes clearly come together more often. A few months earlier, a 20-passenger Dornier commuter plane was grounded in Brisbane, Australia when it was discovered that green caterpillars had invaded a pressure-sensitive instrument area. In Sydney, ten minutes before boarding during a pre-flight safety inspection, rats were discovered in a medical kit on QANTAS Boeing 767. It’s a lot more complicated than just calling an exterminator, since the plane’s wiring had to be checked to ensure the animals hadn’t chewed any, so that plane didn’t go anywhere. In Melbourne, a few months earlier, problems with loading a cheetah on a flight to Adelaide caused a nearly one hour delay.

CQ Grounded

Starting an airline is not easy, especially nowadays. But authorities allege that Roger Sedlak’s fledgling airline, CQ Air, was never destined to fly, using a Harrisburg hub with plans to serve cities in Pennsylvania and the Northeast. Instead, they claim, that he posed as an executive of the airline to secure hotel rooms for staff and customers who were actually prostitutes and their patrons. “Sales” were done online, which is about the only similarity to airline marketing CQ Air had. There were no aircraft, pilots or any kind of operating authority. Federal authorities described the airline as “non-existent” and Sedlak was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Unintentional Gourmet Offering

Airlines often like to showcase their national cuisines aloft, as I know well from flying Chinese carriers where sea cucumber and duck tongues, lungs and webbed feet would not be considered unusual, but in fact gourmet fare. However, Saudi Arabian Airlines got into a rather awkward situation when they were exposed in local newspapers after failing to heed a government warning not to import meat from Tunisia.  Authorities had suspected that beef from Tunisian suppliers was being was actually horse and donkey meat. According to Saudi newspapers, this went on for several months. It’s not known if the equine fare was served to economy or premium class passengers, but at least it wasn’t pork which would have been worse.

Inflight Dress Code

We’ve come a long way from those days, even before my time, when ladies dressed up in hats and gloves and gentlemen wore ties on airplanes Mad Men style. (More on that in a minute!). Today businessmen routinely fly in shorts, flip flops and tees. Consider the case of University of New Mexico football player Deshon Marman who was removed from an Albuquerque-bound USAirways flight in San Francisco on June 15 because his pants were so baggy his boxer shorts and buttocks were in full view. Not only did he refuse to repeatedly comply with the crew member’s request to cover his exposed “body part”, but a policeman was injured in the resulting altercation so he was arrested. But “dress code enforcement”, as everyone knows, is inconsistent, even on the same airline. Just a few days earlier in Fort Lauderdale, a woman snapped a picture of a grey-haired passenger preparing to board a USAirways flight to Phoenix, dressed in skimpy women’s panties, a bra, mid-thigh stockings and high heels. The picture was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, which published it on June 22. It’s widely visible online. USAirways later defended its decision since the panty-clad pax had his “private parts” covered, but the controversy has mushroomed. If you want to see how people used to dress to fly in the Mad Men era, check out ABC’s new TV show, Pan Am, slated to air starting on Sunday night, September 25.(Check local listings or see previews online: http://abc.go.com/shows/pan-am)

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