A pilot for SWISS, annoyed at the security procedure at London’s City Airport stripped naked from the waist down and asked security personnel, “Do you want to search this?” (I like to think he pointed to himself when he said “this” but I’m not sure he did).  Staff were not amused and called the police, [...]

A Polish politician was removed from a Lufthansa flight yesterday after he repeatedly refused to wear his seat belt prior to take off from Munich.  Jan Maria Rokita (I don’t know who that is either) reportedly pushed a flight attendant and was otherwise belligerent.  The pilot then removed him from the airplane.

A couple of bizarre little tidbits from Ryanair’s website about carry on luggage that I thought you might find helpful:
- If your wedding dress is too large to fit in the overhead bins, “you should make a booking online for 2 seats [...]

Spirit Airlines, which I have defended here repeatedly, got another PR beatdown when it was reported that they initially tried to charge two passengers who were originally on Spirit but bumped to the crashed US Airways 1549 flight a $90 change fee since they did not use the return portion of their ticket back home [...]

Good to end the year on a high note:  A couple is suing United Airlines because flight attendants on a flight from Osaka to San Francisco gave the man what may have been an excessive amount of wine.  After consuming said wine, the male part of the couple proceeded to, excuse my language here, kick [...]

It’s time again for the OTR’s nearly annual 10 Strangest Airline Stories of 2008. While we don’t have anything as good as my all-time favorite (Farts Lead to Flight Diversion), there are some gems. With that, here we go:
10) A Nevada brothel offers to reimburse American Airlines’ $15 checked bag fee for visiting [...]

In an absolutely unbelievable breach of security, 50 climate change protesters cut through a fence at Stansted Airport outside London and chained themselves to a fence, yards from a runway.  As you might imagine, this disrupted service to the airport.  As you may not have imagined, it caused the cancellation of dozens of flights, [...]

An elderly passenger flying back from visiting an assisted living home in upstate New York did not get the living assistance she needed after a US Ariways flight attendant put her on a flight to San Juan. Which would’ve been fine, but she lives in Tampa. US Airways can’t explain exactly how that [...]

A pilot for Turkey’s Anadolujet was fired after he allowed a 15-year-old to sit in his seat while the plane was flying from Ankara to Erzurum (and while the pilot went to the bathroom).  The co-pilot had control of the aircraft, but the teenager did have access to the controls.  In 1994 an Aeroflot plane [...]

(Thanks, One Mile at a Time):
A sculptor from Buenos Aires heading to Sydney, Australia, for a vacation last week was surprised when she landed in Sydney, Nova Scotia.  She said she knew something was amiss when she got to Halifax and had to board a Dash-8 prop plane, which probably would not have made it [...]