I don’t have any long horror story about my fellow passengers, just about the airline itself. Recently when I checked into my United flight, I found that we had been assigned seats in the very last row. As I am in a wheelchair, I called the airline to request something a little closer to the front. I was charged $108.00. On the way back, same thing. Even though my reservations stated that I was in a wheelchair, United insisted on placing me in the back of the plane, then charging me to sit closer to the front. First and last time we are flying on United.
Tagged as:
disability,
seats,
united airlines
What is it about flying that makes seemingly normal people go bonkers? There are countless news stories, including some on our site, about passengers who turn belligerent, become violent, or commit bizarre acts. Transgressions aren’t limited solely to passengers. Recently a Delta flight was canceled because two female flight attendants reportedly got into a fistfight, and even pilots have gotten into physical altercations.
One of the most notorious cases occurred on a United Airlines flight from Buenos Aires to New York in 1995. According to accounts, Gerald Finneran, who was a successful president of an investment banking company, a former Citicorp and Drexel Burnham Lambert executive, and a member of the Air Force Academy’s first graduating class, became intoxicated during a flight. When he was refused any more beverages, he decided to help himself. After being told to stop, he became abusive, threatening a FA, delaying a FA from helping a sick passenger, and pushing a FA. Finneran’s grand finale was to defecate on a food cart in the first class section in front of passengers and crew. He used linen napkins as toilet paper, wiped his hands on service counters and service implements, and tracked feces throughout the plane. One of the passengers on the flight was the president of Portugal.
Finneran was arrested when the plane landed in New York. His ignominious actions attracted widespread media attention, including being the subject of a David Letteman Top Ten List. Finneran plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. He was sentenced to probation and fined $5,000 dollars. He was also ordered to serve community service and 2 years probation, attend alcohol counseling, not drink alcohol on flights, and pay $50,000 for airplane clean-up costs plus reimbursement of passenger’s ticket costs. Mr. Finneran died at the age of 67 in 2005 from, according to his obituary, complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Click here for the actual complaint filed in federal court for the Finneran case, and here for a description of outrageous airplane incidents including Finneran’s.
What do you think causes normally respectable people to become berserk on planes? Is it the altitude, alcohol, stresses associated with air travel, fear of flying, confinement, latent mental instability, or something else?
Tagged as:
alcohol,
delta airlines,
flight attendant,
pilot,
police,
poop,
united airlines,
violence
As a student, I tend to travel as cheaply as possible, but my frequent trips also necessitate air travel. Spring break my senior year found me traveling from my hometown of Sioux Falls, SD, to Waco, TX, to interview for a graduate school. Timing was tight, and I was due to return on the Sunday before classes began again on Monday.
My flight was on United, which has a large hub in the Denver airport. I’d flown through Denver before and was confident I would know precisely where to go in the terminal – the United terminal in Denver Int’l is massive, a long hallway of gates and moving walkways, so knowing where you’re going is a priority. I knew I could find my gate, though how long it would take me to walk there was questionable.
My flight from DFW took off without a hitch, and when I landed, I found my gate easily enough – B17. I sat down and pulled out my laptop to watch a movie. About 1/2 hour into the movie, I realized that we hadn’t boarded yet, and checked the board – sure enough, we were delayed because of an oil leak on the plane. Okay, not a problem. My flights are frequently delayed, so I’m used to it. However, it’s never been this bad. After the new delayed boarding time had come and gone, it was announced that our flight would be canceled, and we all needed to go to the United Airlines service desk at gate B45 (or something similar) to reschedule.
The entire group of passengers gets up and hurries our way down to the customer service desk. Just as I arrived, another United Airlines representative yells, “Are y’all from the Sioux Falls flight? It’s not canceled. Go back to your gate.” All right, that’s a fine bit of miscommunication right there. By this time, I’ve become acquainted with several of my fellow passengers, and we walk as a group all the way back to our gate. On the way, we hear some sort of garbled PA announcement about the Sioux Falls flight and something that sounds like “gate 53.” Having no idea whether or not we’re just hearing things or what, my fellow passengers and I continue on to our original gate as we were only two gates away anyway.
We get to our original gate to find it deserted. Not even a gate agent, and the board is blank. I checked the computer screens nearby the gate, and sure enough, our flight has been moved all the way to gate 53 – almost the entire way in the other direction down the terminal. Luckily, it’s been delayed enough that we have time to make it there.
At the new gate, we were delayed even more, but most of my fellow passengers and I were happy enough to just sit down somewhere. Plenty of us were hungry, but none of us wanted to venture very far. Soon, however, we were boarding the plane – at this point, it is about 2 hours after our original departure time. In fact, it’s such a short flight that we’re actually past the time when we should have landed in Sioux Falls in the first place. We found our seats, sat down and most of us were settling in for a quick flight home.
No such luck. We had been on the plane no less than five minutes – but long enough for me to call my parents in Sioux Falls and let them know I was finally on my way home – when the flight attendant came over the intercom to tell us, regrettably, that *this* plane had a mechanical problem with it, too, and we would all have to deplane while the problem was fixed.
We all disembarked, some of us more than grumpy by this point. After another 45 minutes of delays, we were finally allowed to reboard the plane. It was now more than 4 hours past the time we had originally been scheduled to take off. A mere hour long flight later, and we’d touched down in Sioux Falls, only to discover that they had lost my luggage – the perfect cap to the worst airport experience ever.
Tagged as:
airport,
baggage,
delay,
united airlines
Can a flight where nothing bad happened be a flight from hell?
Several years ago, I was flying UA from Burbank. At this point, I don’t even remember where I was going. I just remember that it was a two-plane trip – it had a stop where I had to change planes. The night before the flight, while I was sleeping, I had a particularly powerful and lucid dream. The dream had nothing to do with flying, but out of ‘nowhere’ a booming voice said, clear as anything: “There is something wrong with the second plane!” I woke up suddenly like one does from a nightmare, with the memory of this voice vivid in my head.
I’m not a particularly superstitious person, but I honestly sat at the gate in Burbank the next morning seriously contemplating not getting on the plane. I did eventually convince myself that it was silly, and got on. I had an even harder time getting on the ’second’ plane at my stop. I spent the entire flight in a hypervigilant state, just waiting for something to go wrong. Nothing did. The flight took off, flew, and landed at my destination without anything in any way unusual happening. That completely normal flight: no smelly people, no crying babies, no turbulence, nobody obnoxious, on time, luggage not lost, and certainly crash-free, seemed pretty hellish to me.
Demotage
Tagged as:
united airlines
