Drunks On A Plane: Whose Fault Is That?

Ukraine’s interior minister and his son were detained and prevented from boarding a flight in Frankfurt after what German police described as a drunken, shouting, cell-phone-throwing fit, Reuters reports.

Some news reports said Lufthansa crew refused to let the men board. Others said police detained the men at the airport.

This all comes rather hard on the heels of the case of a British woman who is accused of trying to bite a flight attendant on the leg after taking pills, drinking wine and consuming liquid soap from the restroom. Which raises some questions about who’s responsible for keeping drunks off planes.

An Australian magistrate recently faulted Qantas for  allowing a man to board a plane after he drank six or seven beers, and for serving him two more drinks on board before cutting him off, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The drunk passenger subsequently insulted and threatened other passengers before getting into what the newspaper called a “stoush,” which I discovered means “fight,” with another passenger. Further curious clicking revealed that “stonker” means “to hit hard” or “to knock unconscious.” (I love Australian slang. I’m going to study it as a foreign language.)

Sorry, I digress.  The magistrate thought that Qantas had some responsibility for all that stouching and stonkering.

“Where’s Qantas’s duty of care to other passengers … if they let drunks on the plane?” asked Magistrate Paul Heaney. “They’ve got to show a bit of courage, these airlines.”

I dunno. Flight crews and gate agents can’t necessarily be expected to pick out who’s drunk and who’s not — or more importantly who’s drunk and orderly and who’s drunk and disorderly. Cell-phone throwing is a giveaway, but you can’t count on it going down that way.

The answer may be, as some have suggested, banning alcohol sales on commercial aircraft. It would relieve flight attendants of bartender duties and passengers of drunken seat mates.

On the other hand, maybe the next time some screamer hits the turps and gets off his face on a plane, we should all stonker him. (Thanks KoalaNet for the Australian slang.)

Private Behavior On Public Transportation

I’ve been developing a theory for a while now, fleshing it out each time I get on a train, plane or bus. This theory, which is bound to annoy some folks, is that much of the suburban American population does not know how to behave on public transportation.

I also believe that much of the American public, generally, doesn’t know how to behave in public, period. But I will let that complaint ripen for a decade or two until I can throw the full force of crotchety old age into a particularly cranky rant.

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Amtrak Quiet Car Raises Etiquette Questions

So here’s a new travel etiquette issue for me, and I could use some advice from readers.

I got on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional train in Hartford yesterday and realized, after I sat down,that I was in the quiet car. (The signs were the tipoff: “Quiet Car. Please refrain from loud talking or using cell phones in this car.”)

Great! I was traveling alone and had a lot of work to do. Quiet would be excellent.

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Senator In Airport Confrontation

One of my favorite YouTube videos features a Darth Vadar figure, made of Legos, intoning “Do you know who I am?” at a little Lego food server in the Death Star cafeteria.

Really, it’s hilarious.

So that’s what came to mind when I read a story about Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, who reportedly asked just that question of an airport worker in a reportedly angry confrontation at Dulles. Except Vitter says it was no big deal, nothing to see here, let’s move along folks.

Anyway, the answer to the question, “Do you know who I am?” would in this case be, “Yeah, you’re a guy who missed his flight. Go sit down.”

Airline Apologizes To Passenger Who Threw Fit At Missing Flight

Cathay Pacific has apologized to the woman whose tantrum over missing a flight from Hong Kong was captured on video and became a YouTube sensation. Let’s run that video again and ask who ought to apologize:

The unidentified passenger has complained to the airline that the video embarrassed her. I’m thinking it was her behavior that embarrassed her. The video just spread it around.

Video: Passenger Misses Flight In Hong Kong

A primer, courtesy of YouTube, on how not to behave when you’ve missed a flight:

Terrorism vs. Jerkism

The Assocciated Press reports that many airline passengers who have been convicted under anti-terror laws were merely drunk and disorderly — or just disorderly.

The justification for charging people under anti-terror laws for, say, shouting in an argument over stowing their luggage,is that it makes airline travel safer. People don’t dare to be disruptive and that makes it easier for the crew and/or air marshals to concentrate on spotting terrorists.

There is merit to this argument. And in the confrontations I’ve witnessed between passengers and cabin crew, the crew has been right at least 90 percent of the time. But in many of the cases where passengers have been convicted, the AP reports, there was clearly no intent to get control of the aircraft.

And the more troubling part comes with the other 10 percent of incidents. In some of those cases, passengers can be charged with a serious crime if they stand up for themselves in ways that wouldn’t support a breach of peace charge on the ground.

More Brits Behaving Badly

I was low on bandwidth for a while, so I missed this story about British passengers run amok on a cruise to Barbados.

Seems like every other week there’s a story in the British press about drunk Brits behaving badly on a plane or a ship. This is blamed on a species of person known as a chav, and in this case it is alleged that low fares attracted them.

As a commenter on my blog explained: “”Chav” is beyond white trash. They are universally and pointlessly violent and destructive. They break things for entertainment and dress like wanna-be rapper gangsters.”

OK, but even if all chavs are low-fare passengers, not all low-fare passengers are chavs. Some of us are just cheap.

First-Class Rudeness

I enjoyed this entertaining piece by Scott Carmichael on the Gadling blog about bad behavior among passengers in first class.

He asserts that rudeness is not exclusive to the coach cabin, and that some particularly arrogant misbehavior is more prevalent up front. Chief among these is the “Do you know who I am?” syndrome, when self-important passengers try to bully flight attendants.

I just can’t hear that phrase without laughing because it reminds me of the Death Star Cafeteria routine by the comedian Eddie Izzard, who imagines Darth Vadar asking just that question as he tries to order lunch from an unimpressed guy behind the counter.

There’s a great version with Lego figures. If you can take a little salty language, watch it. 

More About The British Behaving Badly

I’ve met some British tourists here and there, but never the kind that is getting all the press these days.

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” the mayor of Malia, Greece, told The New York Times. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

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