Will That Be Coffee, Tea or Prozac, Sir?

by Tjames Madison

1999-08-07 05:22:10

Bad People

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...

Check it out yourself

kabdriver@pigdog.org