(Full credit for this goes to Mark Ashley at Upgrade Travel Better…thanks for the heads up)
Mark points out a really, really great site for ridiculous airline stories over at the Aviation Herald.  The site appears to report all aviation-related incidents, from mechanical issues (whatever) to passengers acting like idiots (fantastic).  Just go through and pick [...]

A Canadian woman whose name matched that of a known criminal suffered a bit of humiliation last week when security officials at a Montreal Airport asked her to prove that she was not the fugitive by stripping down and showing that her butt did not have a tattoo on it. After passing through customs, [...]

An Air Madagascar flight from Madagascar to Paris made an unexpected detour to Dakar, Senegal, to drop off Madagascar’s President who, for whatever reason, was on board the commercial flight.  Passengers were told about the extremely out-of-the-way detour upon boarding the flight, even though the airline knew about it well in advance.  The flight arrived [...]

An EasyJet gate agent told a 6-year old girl traveling from Glasgow to Stansted that she would have to gate check her new teddy bear because the airline considered it to be excess baggage.  Then they told her mother she would have to pay 9 Pounds to check it.
The little girl had wrapped the teddy [...]

Catching up on what we missed while I was out…
Model Sarah Hannon was arrested for being drunk on an aircraft following a Kingfisher Airlines flight from Bangalore to London back in April.  
There was something else about this story…what was it?  Hm.  I can’t rememb–oh right.  She was drinking with her boyfriend before the flight.  The [...]

Cathay Pacific is investigating whether a purser allowed a couple traveling in first class from Toronto to Hong Kong to have sex in the crew rest area of the 777.  The passenger, a doctor in his 20s, and his girlfriend were, uh, cuddling in first class when the purser allegedly asked if they’d like to [...]

A Turkish Airlines plane mistakenly landed at the wrong airport near Tbilisi, Georgia, yesterday, touching down at a military air base rather than the commercial airport 10 miles away.  Incredibly, this did not cause a massive international incident.  And also luckily for the passengers, they did not mistakenly land in Atlanta, Georgia.

A JetBlue employee fell asleep (?) in the cargo hold of a plane at JFK and woke up after the plane took off for Boston.  The employee said he called the airline when he realized the plane was no longer on the ground.  With airlines laying off thousands of workers, for some reason they hadn’t [...]

A group of ultra-orthodox rabbis in Israel has a serious beef (Hebrew National?) with El Al because the airline has dared to – gasp – show movies on its flights.  The Rabbinical Transportation Committee (?) has compiled a list of airlines that they recommend because they do not show movies, which may be considered too [...]

A Southern California helicopter pilot had his license suspended for the 5th time after a video of him surfaced in flagrante delicto with a porn actress while flying a helicopter (editor’s note:  for some reason all media use “porn star” to refer to anyone in the porn industry.  That’s a pretty low bar to set [...]