Drunks on Planes
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 3:22 PM

Usually it's the customers that you have to worry about. Not always, though, at least in Russia. (Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer.)

When I was boarding my flight across the Atlantic on July 4, there were a couple of loud (though seemingly harmless) guys in the boarding area who seemed to be rather drunk. They boarded the plane (everyone else hoping, "oh no, I hope I am not seated next to them") without incident, but just before we were getting ready to leave the gate, Chicago Police Officers boarded and watched while flight attendants informed the gentlemen that they would have to deplane -- which they did, again without incident. But I wonder why they allowed the obviously drunk people to board in the first place? Police were all over the boarding area.

Incidentally, to round out my deplaning experiences, for the flight back to the states, a gentleman was removed even after the door was originally closed. In this case, however, he was anxious to leave the plane -- so anxious, in fact, that he was shouting/crying "Please let me off the plane, please let me off." (It was even hard to watch, though impossible not to.) Turned out he had a pathological fear of flying. So I guess that, for him, even boarding in the first place was a bit of a triumph.

Labels: alcohol, Chicago, Russia, solipsism