Every Friday, FlyerTalk looks back at the week’s most charming individuals. While there are always plenty of contenders for our Worst Passenger of the Week award, only one lucky flyer can take home the glory. Here are this week’s winners.
Third Place – Leatherface’s Victim
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre films have caused nightmares for generations of moviegoers, but a far more disturbing scene this week at a TSA checkpoint at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport didn’t even come with a mature content advisory. The sight of a prop, a mutilated corpse of a serial killer’s victim being fed through an X-ray machine as TSA agents gawked at the dead “body”” was certainly not for general audiences, but the agency posted pictures of the bizarre situation on Twitter.
The lifelike corpse naturally earned a little extra scrutiny from screeners on its way through the airport, but the gory, man-sized bit of cinema history was eventually allowed to rest in peace in the cargo hold of a departing flight.
Though there was a perfectly reasonable (or somewhat reasonable) explanation for the surreal scene, once seen, the rather creepy images cannot be unseen. Frequent flyers can now look forward to an appearance from Leatherface in their next TSA-inspired night terror.
The Runner-up – The Sandman’s Victim
Maybe it was a scary dream about a mutilated corpse being pushed through an X-ray machine at ATL or maybe just like Jennifer Aniston, it was a bad dream about no showers on the plane. In any case, a passenger on a Virgin Australia flight bound from Perth Airport (PER) to Sydney Airport (SYD) had a hell of a nightmare.
The passenger reportedly began screaming and thrashing in his sleep. The man’s night terrors were allegedly so violent that the captain decided to divert the plane to Adelaide Airport (ADL) to remove the disruptive passenger. Australian Federal Police met the flight when it arrived and escorted the sleepy troublemaker from the plane.
In a statement, Virgin Australia said that the flight made an “unscheduled stop” at ADL to remove the passenger who caused so much mischief in his sleep as a “precautionary measure.” No charges were filed against the rowdy slumberer who reportedly explained his behavior to police by saying that he had simply suffered from “bad dreams.”
The Winners – The Witch Hunt Organizers “An Act of Total Racism”
Racist suspicions about people who look different aren’t anything new. Lately, however, it seems that casting aspersions on fellow passengers based on nothing more than ethnicity is becoming commonplace. This month, an Ivy League professor was removed from a flight at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL) and questioned, all because a fellow passenger decided that the algebra equations he was studying were cause for alarm. A few weeks earlier, a UC Berkley student was denied transportation on Southwest Airlines, allegedly because another passenger heard him speaking Arabic on his cell phone. Just this week, a man pled guilty to yelling “Take it off, this is America!” and then forcefully removing a headscarf from a Muslim passenger on yet another Southwest flight.
In the most recent case, this time in Europe, the captain of the Monarch Airlines flight due to depart from Manchester Airport (MAN) for Fiumicino – Leonardo da Vinci International Airport (FCO), even described the incident as “an act of total racism.” In the end, two passengers voluntarily agreed to take an alternate flight the next day, because a couple on the original flight baselessly felt that the two men resembled terrorists.
“Monarch can confirm that two passengers voluntary offloaded themselves from this flight and that police were in attendance for two further passengers who subsequently chose to travel today,” airline officials confirmed in a statement. “Following an additional security check, the flight left 90 minutes later.”
The bottom line was that the victims, who took the high road, were reaccommodated on another flight while the accusers decided to travel the next day.
[Photo: Instagram/@TSAmedia_LisaF]