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![No exceptions: Travelers on Vatican-backed Mistral Air took a pilgrimage to Lourdes -- and then had their holy water seized by airport security.]()
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![http://images.usatoday.com/_common/_images/clear.gif]()
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No exceptions: Travelers on Vatican-backed
Mistral Air took a pilgrimage to Lourdes -- and then had their holy
water seized by airport security.
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2007
was not kind to travelers. Flights were packed and delays legion. Gas prices
soared. The dollar tanked. But at least travel news offered some levity.
USA TODAY's Jayne Clark reviews stories that made us shudder —
or laugh. And laugh we did, because if we didn't have a sense of humor about
travel's vagaries, we would have just stayed home.
Crowded
flights sparked tempers, igniting nastiness more often associated with
barrooms than aircraft cabins. Among this year's low blows:
•A
fracas involving 20 passengers erupted in June on a flight from Lagos,
Nigeria, to London. It was touched off when a passenger took exception to the
reclining seat in front of him. Fliers duked it out with fists, bottles and
belts, causing the captain to make an emergency landing.
•In
July, a flight from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Turkey turned back after the
crew was unable to break up a fight involving three inebriated men. It
started, said the Russian News and Information Agency, when one of the men
was "given the cold shoulder" by a woman he was chatting up and hit
her in the face.
•A
British couple pleaded guilty last summer to charges stemming from disruptive
behavior on a 2005 flight from London to Jamaica, which included pursuit of
"mile-high club" membership. After reportedly having sex in an
aircraft bathroom, the couple, who had been drinking, caused additional
disturbances in the cabin, and wound up handcuffed as the flight was diverted
to Bermuda.
Passengers
weren't the only ones guilty of bad behavior in 2007. In April, a Northwest
Airlines pilot locked himself in an airline restroom, where he had a loud,
obscenity-laced conversation on his cellphone as passengers boarded his
flight in Las Vegas. When confronted by a passenger, the pilot cussed at him.
The flight was canceled as a result of "inappropriate language by a
crewmember," the airline said.
In other
flight crew missteps:
•A
British Airways flight from New Delhi to London was delayed 13 hours after
the pilot refused to fly, saying he'd had a lousy night's sleep in a noisy
hotel room and needed to catch up on his rest.
•SkyWest
airlines apologized to a passenger who said he was forced to urinate in an
airsickness bag during a short flight in March because the only restroom was
closed due to a malfunctioning light. The man told the Salt Lake Tribune he'd
had two "really big beers. It was like I had no choice." The pilot
called police upon landing in Salt Lake, but the airline later gave the
passenger a travel voucher in addition to the apology.
Rude and
annoying people weren't the only elements that made unpleasant flights
downright ugly. Consider these:
•Toilets
overflowed on an Amsterdam-Newark flight on Continental Airlines in June,
causing passenger Collin Brock to tell a Seattle television station King 5
News, "I was forced to sit next to human excrement for seven
hours."
•A
passenger in first class on a British Airways Delhi-London flight in March
awoke to discover that a corpse, upgraded from coach, had been propped in a
seat in his row.
"She
kept slipping under the seat belt and moving about with the motion of the
plane," Paul Trinder told Britain's Sunday Times. "When I
asked what was going on, I was shocked to hear she was dead."
Meanwhile,
airport security personnel continued their anti-terrorist vigilance, causing
the following to happen:
•A
64-year-old man was hospitalized earlier this month after chugging a liter of
vodka rather than surrendering it at a checkpoint in Germany's Nuremberg
airport.
•In
the Philippines in February, a German tourist displayed his annoyance —
among other things — when he dropped his pants after being asked to go
through a metal detector a second time. Unamused officials summoned police.
•An
exasperated mother dumped the contents of her toddler's sippy cup on the
floor at Washington's Reagan National Airport in June after officials told
her she'd have to empty it if she wanted to keep the cup. She claimed
mistreatment by the Transportation Security Administration and said she'd
accidentally spilled the water. The TSA later posted a video of the incident
on its website to bolster its version of the situation.
•Not
even Vatican-backed Mistral Air was willing to appeal to a higher power when
authorities confiscated holy water from pilgrims returning from the Roman
Catholic shrine at Lourdes, France. The airline's president cited rules that
ban carry-on containers holding more than 3 ounces of liquid, telling the
Associated Press, "These (regulations) have to be respected."
However,
keen-eyed security officers occasionally missed a trick: Ginger the cat, for
one, who climbed unnoticed into a suitcase in May while her owner was packing
for a flight from St. John, New Brunswick, to Toronto.
Screeners
didn't spot the cat, though they did ask the woman if she was carrying a
turkey. "I was adamant: 'Look, I have no turkey,' " she told the
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Almost 900 miles later, the cat was let out of
the bag. Alive!
Other
critter capers on the road this year:
•Animal
expert Jack Hanna got stuck in an airport turnstile at Ohio State University
Airport with an 11-month-old flamingo in September. Firefighters freed the
bird. Hanna got out under his own power and quipped he'll never again travel
with any animal larger than a gerbil, the Associated Press reported. A stowaway
squirrel on an American Airlines flight from Tokyo to Dallas in February
caused the plane to land in Honolulu. An airline spokesman told the
Associated Press the pilots were worried the "varmint" might damage
the plane's wiring.
•Nepal
Airlines personnel sacrificed two goats on the runway in front of a
malfunctioning Boeing 757 to appease the "Hindu god of sky
protection," Reuters wire service reported in September. After the goat
sacrifice, the plane took off for Hong Kong.
With air
travel becoming so arduous, some travelers dreamed up innovative
alternatives.
•In
April, a New York couple paid a cabbie $3,000 plus expenses to drive them and
their two cats 2,400 miles to their new retirement home in Sedona, Ariz.
•In
July, an Oregon man attached 105 large helium balloons to a lawn chair, with
plans to fly to Idaho. Almost nine hours and 193 miles later, he touched down
in a farmer's field, a tad short of the state line. "It was beautiful
— beautiful," lawn-chair pilot Kent Couch told television station
KTVZ-TV.
The year
had its usual complement of under-the-influence vacationers doing stupid
things. Two of the luckier ones:
•After
a night of drinking in January, a 29-year-old man made a running leap through
a window in a Minneapolis hotel and fell 16 stories. He suffered broken bones
and internal injuries but survived.
•The
Coast Guard rescued a 35-year-old man almost eight hours after he jumped
through a window of a Carnival cruise ship. A witness said he'd been
drinking.
Mistaken
identity caused red faces in some tourism promotional circles. Mea culpas
went out from:
•Royal
Nepal Airlines for using a photo of the Incan ruins at Machu Picchu in Peru
to illustrate a poster that asked, "Have you seen Nepal?"
•The
Tennessee Department of Tourist Development for running a 10-year-old photo
of mountain bike riders in Alaska in an advertising campaign dubbed,
"Tennessee: The Stage is Set for You," The (Nashville) Tennessean
reported in February.
•New
Zealand tourism officials for digitally enhancing some photos in its
"100% New Zealand" campaign.
Other
notable moments in travel public relations this year:
•The
blogosphere was abuzz over an incident last summer in which a Southwest
Airlines employee asked a curvaceous 23-year-old woman in a short skirt and
tight top to exit the plane because she was too provocatively dressed.
Kyla
Ebbert, a college student who worked at Hooters, made some sartorial
adjustments and was allowed to remain on the San Diego-Tucson flight. The
episode catapulted her to 15 minutes of fame when she appeared on the Today
show in the same outfit. Southwest — which in the past made flight
attendants wear hot pants — recovered from the PR stumble when its
president issued an apology to Ebbert, noting, "As we both know, this
story has great legs," and launched a skimpy fares promotion.
•Icaro,
an Ecuadoran airline, seized on a less buttoned-down PR scheme in June when
it staged lingerie fashion shows on some routes. "It was a surprise. A
nice surprise," a passenger told Reuters. "Before the trip was
short. Now it feels really short."
•And
finally, the NH Alcalá hotel in Madrid, which was scheduled for renovation,
allowed 30 "highly stressed-out people" (as determined by a team of
psychologists) to take out their frustrations on its guest rooms in July.
True road warriors, the customers took up sledgehammers and battering rams
and rampaged to their hearts' content.
We only
wish we'd been invited.
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