So, the news media is all up wound up right now about "air
rage," it seems. Apparently, airline passengers everywhere
are just getting fed up with high prices and bad service
and people are just going BAD CRAZY on plane flights all
over the world!
Last Tuesday, for example, an American businessman, Sanil Kumar, was flying
from Los Angeles to Singapore via a Singapore Airlines plane when he decided to
get real good and drunk on those little airline bottles of booze. By the time
the plane left its stopover in Tokyo for the final leg of the trip to
Singapore, Kumar was visibly drunk, according to other passengers. He started
to bellow obscenities at passengers in economy class, then suddenly demanded to
see the captain.
After a flight supervisor told him he wouldn't be allowed into the cockpit,
Kumar shoved the supervisor in the chest and continued toward the front of the
plane, where he was met by a steward, who told him the captain was "busy." But
instead of returning to his seat, Kumar went over to a nearby emergency door
and tried to lift the handle while shouting "Tonight, everybody will die!"
Then a bunch of passengers and crew members jumped on him and smothered him for
the rest of the flight.
Some people just get a nasty hangover when bad craziness like this happens, but
Kumar got a jail sentence. A judge in Singapore, a country not known for
leniency, sentenced Kumar to six months in prison yesterday and fined him
$1,000 for being drunk, to boot.
Ironically, on the same day that Kumar was working up his big airborne drunk a
British tourist was busy beating the crap out of a flight attendant, an
action he ended up getting fined $300 for by a considerably more lenient
British judge. Maybe there really is something to this whole air rage
phenomenon...
