Category Archives for Passengers.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz just bailed on the state and headed for Mexico, in the midst of a tremendous crisis.
There’s not a ton that Texas Senator Ted Cruz can do to fix the problem now but it’s not a good look, bailing on Texas for a United flight out of Houston to Cancun for warmth while state utilities melt down.
A passenger on a Los Angeles – Tokyo flight last year attacked a flight attendant who refused him a cocktail. The captain diverted the flight to Anchorage, and now the man has to pay $49,793 to cover meals and lodging for passengers and crew during the diversion.
He doesn’t have to pay the airline’s additional costs, such as fuel or labor costs, resulting from the diversion. He’ll get 5 years of probation. But he won’t go to prison because his lawyer says he has diabetes, which is a co-morbidity for Covid-19. Covid-19 is his ‘get out of jail’ card.
A passenger on board Delta Air Lines flight DL2349 on Sunday tried to open a cabin door while inflight. That almost never works out the way the passenger wants, because pressurization .
Another passenger on the Boston-bound flight reports that the man was nearly 300 pounds. Law enforcement on board tried to subdue the man after he hit the first class flight attendant, and passenger taking video joined in to help, asking other passengers to hand him a belt to tie the man up.
In 1991 I’m Too Sexy was an absolute anthem. Right Said Fred hit number one in the U.S. with their debut single, something no other band has done since the Beatles. I’d call them a one hit wonder but their next single “Don’t Talk Just Kiss” did hit #76 on the Billboard top 100.
But did you know that Right Said Fred is still a thing? And that they’ve released an album as recently as 2017? Perhaps desperate for relevance they’ve taken on a new profile criticizing the U.K. government’s response to the pandemic (fair enough) and also refusing to wear masks during air travel and promoting skepticism about vaccines.
A man lost a bet and had to go to the airport and fly home dressed up as Ronald McDonald. And naturally there’s video of the whole thing. It all starts applying makeup at a Party City store and then heading off. Everything is going great until airport security.
The TSA was a real spoil sport here. They wouldn’t let him through security without taking his makeup off, ostensibly because they needed to match his face to his ID. He left and then returned looking defeated. Although actually proceeding through the TSA nude-o-scope as a well-masked fast food icon was well worth the effort.
It’s common for a Southwest flight to end and some passengers to stay on the plane. That’s because on ‘through flights’ passengers connecting on the plane’s next segment stay on board while everyone else gets off. Then a flight attendant counts the through passengers on the plane. They can get off to stretch their legs and reboard (with the same boarding pass as their first flight!) or stay where they’re at.
But it’s very unusual to see everyone getting off the plane, and a passenger just decide to stay. They even melt down in a scream when a flight attendant pressures them to leave.
Shouldn’t there just be a different standard for responding to disturbances on Spirit Airlines, with maybe the new Spirit Airlines frequent flyer program bonusing these sorts of incidents (though with their frequency, that could become expensive)? Treat Spirit flights like a sort of Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle,
One man hopped a British Airways plane out of Africa and made it the 11 hour journey across 5500 miles – and lived to tell the tale.
30 year old Themba Cabeka “held on to the jet’s undercarriage for the entire 11-hour flight from South Africa to London Heathrow in 2015.” He was discovered on the runway after the plane landed at Heathrow, and he was unconscious and hospitalized for six months. He was granted asylum and now lives in Liverpool. His friend for the journey wasn’t as lucky.
Like Julie Delpey’s character in Before Sunrise Salma Saade and her boyfriend Finlay McAfee were together in Europe and Finlay traveled to see her – and spent a night wandering around a major European city. Only he did it in Paris, alone. And they met on Tinder, not on a train. But bear with me for the story.
Two days after the protests and riot at the U.S. Capitol, John Lolos had boarded a Delta flight at Washington National airport. The plane was taxiing out, but the pilot decided to return to the gate because he was reportedly yelling “Trump 2020!” Airport police met the aircraft at the gate.
The man was rebooked by Delta, but police later arrested them because something of something they saw on Instagram: the man’s shirt.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
