Dogstar Tweet Stream

Today’s post was going to be about my work in Baltimore with the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, but happenings in Chicago trump that post.

I flew from Baltimore to Chicago in an incredibly un-eventful flight this evening as my wee video attests to.



I arrived in Chicago and went to the service desk to see if I could get an upgrade. I was upgraded to first class between Chicago and Denver. We got on board United flight 959 and everything looked great. The plane was loaded a full 20 minutes early, which for a Chicago flight is astonishing.

Well, the luck didn’t last.

Suddenly three passengers were being escorted off the flight by security. That turned into six.

One of the flight attendants shared with us that several men has been acting strangely, passing cell phones and iPods back and forth and then claiming that they didn’t know each other. Worse, one man they were looking for was not in his seat and couldn’t be found. Apparently they had come from an Arabic airliner, or so the rumour went.

One of the flight attendants looked particularly distressed—she was the one that saw the men acting oddly.

Then two more men were taken off and the captain told us everything had been attended to and the bags of these seven had been taken off the plane. The cabin started clapping. At least until the door was opened again at which point an eighth man was taken off. We were told something about some of their names perhaps being on a watch list.

We pushed away from the gate two hours late and many people were awfully grumpy.

Moral of the story—don’t share your phone and iPod with a stranger!

While it would have been nice if these men hadn't gotten as far as getting on the plane, I'm glad that United took the time they did to ensure everything was safe and secure. I do hope that, as the captain said, "it is probably just a big misunderstanding" but better safe than sorry.

Anyhow, I have posted a shortish video of the goings on that I took with my Treo and edited in iMovie. Sorry for the bad video and audio, but it was taken with a cell phone for pete sakes!



digg this