Sometimes passenger tales just don't add up...

Cabin of a SWA B737 jet

Two interesting flying incidents in the news today. First was a story I came across via a twitter friend, of a pregnant woman being put off of a Spirit Airlines flight:

A New York doctor claims that he was booted from a Spirit Airlines flight for asking for water for his pregnant wife on Sunday.

Mitchell Roslin, the Chief of Obesity Surgery at Manhattan's Lenox Hill Hospital, says that after being grounded at LaGuardia Airport for two hours in a hot plane his attempts to get water for his 7-month pregnant wife were repeatedly refused.

Some things about this make sense and others don't add up. For starters, the lack of water for a pregnant woman. I can see a physician having the attitude that everything under the sun should be provided for him and his family ("get my wife water, STAT!"). I can also see a physician being cheap, flying a budget airline, and still expecting to be treated like he's on the old Concorde. This is a good indicator of a solid lack of common sense. Your wife is pregnant? Go to the newsstand two gates down from your departure gate and get her a bottle of water. It's not rocket science. Delays happen, not to mention the fact that people often get thirsty when the flight attendants are otherwise occupied. I usually don't sweat a domestic flight, but will often pick up a bottle of water to keep hydrated on an 8+ hour flight to Europe.

Now, for the booted-from-the-plane part. This account doesn't add up. If the plane was delayed on the taxiway, why did they go back to the gate? No sane airline is going to return a flight to the gate once it's pushed back just because someone is thirsty. Can you imagine the dialog between the pilot and his ops center?

PILOT: we need to return to the gate

OPS: why?

PILOT: We have a woman who is pregnant and thirsty who is begging for water.

OPS: do you have water onboard?

PILOT: yes.

OPS: well, give her some water and take off, you moron!

So, if the plane returned for some other reason, the woman should have been able to grab a water bottle back at the concourse and all is well.

If the guy was booted from the plane for something he did or said, it's quite likely he would also have been arrested. Disrupting a flight to the point where it's forced to return to the departure gate is getting you a ticket to jail. No mention of jail here. It doesn't add up.

As for Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith, he's one fat guy. I don't care if he can hold his breath long enough to get the seat belt on and the armrest down--when he exhales, that gut (look at the photo here) is going into the next seat. If someone is seated there, they're going to be buried in a fat avalanche. I say this as a fat guy myself; I'm very conscious of making sure I don't push someone out of the space they paid for. OK, he writes comedy, and twitter's a great outlet for it, but that doesn't alter the fact that I wouldn't want to sit next to him as he flops all over me. I don't care if he is famous. Buy the second seat or get off.

As to why SWA didn't just shut him down in the first place, I can't explain. Maybe they were hoping they could get him on a standby flight and not put someone ext to him. It's hard to say, and no doubt SWA just wishes it would all go away. I applaud SWA for not putting up with his crap.

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