Vote for the worst airline employee ever

by Jamie Rhein on

In all honesty, most airline employees are fine, sensible sorts–stellar even. They are the type that you can count on to get you from here to there with as little fuss and muss as possible. However, there are exceptions and in those cases, the mistakes can be doozies.

Rick Seaney has been keeping track of the airline employee stories that have created head shakes and eye-rolls. The “How stupid can a person be?” stories. These are the six stories he has come up with that are the worst of the bad. Read them and laugh. Or weep. And then vote for which airline employee you think is the worst of the worst. We’ll keep track of what you think.

  • Airline employee who escorts a child to the wrong airplane, thus sends the little darling to the wrong destination. Here’s the latest one of those stories we’ve posted about in the past
  • Baggage handler who falls asleep in the cargo hold and ends up taking off with the plane. The last guy who did this had an unusual ride to Boston from JFK.
  • Pilot who begins slurring his speech during the take-off announcement and scares the heck out of passengers so much that they demand that he return them to the terminal. We caught those details here.
  • Airline employee who helps a friend get a gun on board.
  • Truck driver who drives an airport vehicle across the tarmac in front of moving airplanes.
  • Baggage handler who steals loot from bags and sells bounty on EBay.

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Seany’s ABC News article, along with giving details about each of the mishaps, provides tips on how to avoid these airline employees if you can help it.

Passengers revolt and refuse to fly without a new pilot

by Jamie Rhein on

Last month, two passengers heading through airport security thought a pilot was drunk and called the authorities. Last May, a pilot was found drunk and naked in the woods. In this latest what-is-wrong-with-the-pilot episode, more than 100 passengers on a Boeing 767 jet bound for New York from Moscow signed a paper saying they thought the pilot was three sheets to the wind.

This happened after the pilot sounded inebriated when he slurred the preflight announcements. According to this article in The Moscow Times, when he switched to English, the passengers had enough and refused to allow Aeroflot Flight 315 to take off.

It didn’t matter one bit that the flight attendants told the passengers to “stop making trouble,” and if the passengers didn’t like it, they could get off the plane. The passengers called for reinforcement from Aeroflot’s home office, but the talking heads wouldn’t pay any attention to the passengers either–at least not until a Russian TV personality and socialite, who happened to be on the plane, stepped in.

Finally, the pilot, along with the other three pilots on board, were switched out so new pilots could get the passengers air bound.

As absurd as this story sounds, consider this. An Aeroflot representative later said that it wasn’t that big a deal if a pilot is drunk because the plane flies itself with a press of a button. Kent?