Just Plane Weird

The following is reprinted from Bathroom Readers' Institute's 17th edition Uncle John's Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader book. The fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds of aluminum and pretzels can fly is weird enough, but it gets weirder.

COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT

Artyom Chernopup, a passenger on a Russian Aeroflot flight, was upset because some of the flight attendants were obviously intoxicated. When he complained about it, three of the drunken crew members beat him up. Chernopup planned to press charges; Aeroflot announced that the entire crew would be “temporarily dismissed.”

WALK THIS WAY

A 35-year-old man was asked to remove his belt while he was going through airport security in Cologne, Germany. He refused. When told that he had to do it to get on the plane, he angrily took off his belt—and his pants—and walked through the detector in his underwear. (No alarms sounded.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Louis Paul Kadlecek of Angelton, Texas, started celebrating his 21st birthday on February 25, 2004. He was still drunk four days later when he decided to break into the Brazoria County Airport and steal an airplane (he had never flown one before). He got into a single-engine Cessna (with a case of beer) and took off. A mile later he flew the plane into a 100,000-volt power line, cutting off electricity to a large portion of the county, and plunged 100 feet to the ground. The drunken man then got up and walked the three miles back to his home. Police arrested him the next morning. When asked where he had planned to take the plane, he answered, “I don’t know—Mexico, maybe.” He faces up to 20 years in prison.

IT’S NOT FUNNY

A week after two America West pilots were fired for showing up drunk, a passenger was thrown off an America West plane in San Francisco when she jokingly asked flight attendants if they had “checked the crew for sobriety.” The airline said the woman’s remarks “constituted a potential security problem.” David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, called it an abuse of authority. “They ought to put up a big sign with an ‘H’ and a slash through it for ‘No Humor Zone’ because there’s no joking allowed.”

DID THEY SEE ANYTHING?

Several security screeners at Denver International Airport were reprimanded in 2004 after they sent themselves through the X-ray machine “to see what their brains looked like.”

HOW MANY WERE DETAINED? NUN.

An American Airlines plane was evacuated in Dallas because someone thought they detected a strange smell onboard. No problem was found, so they let all the passengers back on, except for four nuns. The four Indian-born nuns, who were returning home to California from their Christmas vacation, were questioned for six hours before they were allowed to get on another flight. The explanation: “The crew members didn’t feel comfortable taking you inside.” “We didn’t know we looked suspicious,” said Sister Tessy Pius. (American Airlines later sent them a formal apology.)

JAILBIRD

Perhaps they saw a telltale bump in his pants. Or heard chirping noises. Or maybe it was just because he was arriving from Cuba. Whatever the reason, airport inspectors were suspicious of Carlos Avila when he landed in Miami in October 2001. They asked him to raise his pant legs…and discovered he had 44 birds strapped to his legs. Smuggling charges were made worse by the fact that Avila had signed papers specifically stating that he was not bringing birds into the United States. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

BETTER THAN A SEAT BELT

In 2002 the BBC reported that a woman on a Scandinavian Airlines flight got stuck to the airplane toilet when she pushed the button for the vacuum-powered flush. Sealed to the seat, she was unable to get up until technicians pried her loose hours later, after the plane had landed in the United States. (Great story, huh? Unfortunately it never really happened. At first Scandinavian Airlines confirmed the story, then later claimed it was all a big mistake—probably a fictional emergency from a training manual.) Reprinted from Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader. ©2004 by the Bathroom Reader’s Press.
The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers' Institute. The 17th book in this the Bathroom Reader series is filled to the brim with facts, fun, and fascination, including articles about the Origin of Kung Fu, How to Kill a Zombie, Women in Space and more! Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

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