The Moment Two Passengers Emerge Together From a United Airlines Lavatory

by Gary Leff

lavatory
Sep 07 2019

Women were lining up for the lavatory for about ten minutes, and no one was coming out. That’s usually when you hope a flight attendant will put some coffee grounds in there between uses. A flight attendant notices the line, saying to one of the women “you’re still right here” as no one has moved.

When the lavatory door opens a man appears and then “[j]ust a few seconds later, a woman in a matching red jumper also walks out from the cramped room, apparently having just joined the Mile High Club.”

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Man Loses Job After Demanding Only White Flight Attendants Serve Him on British Airways

by Gary Leff

plane tails
Sep 07 2019

Maybe this isn’t the strangest part of the story, but it strikes me that the racist would demand that minorities serve him, not that they not be allowed to perform in servile roles.

According to the man’s attorney his family is the real victim here, the man’s wife “suffered from stress due to the allegation” and he lost his job. They’re not even welcome at their kids’ school anymore. The man and his wife are New Zealanders and even considered moving back there.

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American’s Internal Memo on the Miami Mechanic Who Sabotaged a Plane

by Gary Leff

american-airlines-plane
Sep 06 2019

News that an American Airlines mechanic in Miami sabotaged an aircraft before it prepared to take off with passengers was truly shocking. The man admitted that he wanted to delay or cancel the flight out of frustration with union contract talks, and to force more overtime work to fix the problem he had caused.

American Airlines had to address the issue with employees as well. Here’s the memo that was sent internally:

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A West Virginia Heiress-Turned-Arms Dealer Bought Wow Air and Will Restart Flights Next Month

by Gary Leff

wow plane
Sep 06 2019

Michele Ballarin is a West Virginia heiress who served as a go-between with Somali pirates and tried to get the CIA to hire her to kill Al Qaeda jihadists. She was “a trusted confidante of Somali pirates and warlords.”

Ballarin ran for Congress in the 1980s in Morgantown but the 31 year old lost badly, paying for her campaign “with money from her first husband, a man several decades older than her who had landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and amassed a small fortune as a real-estate developer.” She and her second husband, a bartender at Manhattan’s 21 Club, moved to Georgetown and then moved to an estate in Markham, Virginia named “Wolf’s Crag,” which had belonged to a famous Confederate commander known as “The Black Knight of the Confederacy.”

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Fare Alert: Europe Roundtrip from Many U.S. Cities From $290 on British Airways, Finnair

by Gary Leff

plane tails
Sep 06 2019

For travel between mid-October and early December, and again January through mid-May (in other words outside of peak holiday dates and before peak summer) you can get some amazing coach fares to Europe from across the U.S.

Travel is available to Zurich, Munich, Geneva, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Vienna, Brussels, Berlin, and Dusseldorf and this deal is available for people departing from at least 30 different U.S. cities.

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American Airlines Mechanic Charged With Sabotaging an Aircraft About to Depart

by Gary Leff

american-airlines-plane
Sep 06 2019

We haven’t reached the point of a strike, and the airline and its mechanics are headed back to the bargaining table with the National Mediation Board next week. However tensions have certainly been high. For instance a video of an American Airlines supervisor yelling at a mechanic went viral in June (though note there’s NSFW language):

Now we’ve learned that at least one mechanic took things way too far

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The Pan Am Flight Attendant Who Gave Her Life Saving Passengers on a Hijacked Flight 33 Years Ago

by Gary Leff

Sep 05 2019

Pan Am flight 73 flew from Mumbai to the U.S. with a stop in Karachi, Pakistan on September 5, 1986. It was hijacked by four Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization terrorists who wanted to use the Boeing 747-121 to free prisoners in Syria and Israel.

There were 380 passengers and 13 crew on board the aircraft. All but 22 survived, and much of the credit goes to the flight’s purser, 22 year old Neerja Bhanot who died near the end of the standoff.

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