It is hard to imagine my journey starting off with a more ridiculous twist than what took place on my flight down to Paris for my cousin’s wedding. After seeing my parents off on their flight, which departed 30 minutes earlier than mine, I sat down and awaited a fairly easy 8 hour flight over to my connection in Amsterdam.
Halfway through the flight, as we began to cross over into the Atlantic (and during a pretty intense scene of “300” which I was watching), a small and plump Indian man came to the front of the coach section and started complaining to one of the more flamboyant flight attendants that he was being treated rudely by another flight attendant. After several minutes of incomprehensible arguing, he returned to his seat.
About 20 minutes later, the entire flight crew seemed to be rushing all over the plane in a frantic fury. As this was going on, the plane seemed to be turning around, and rapidly descending in the opposite direction of Amsterdam. In a matter of seconds, the NWA screens had changed our destination from Amsterdam to Gander, Newfoundland! In the back of my head, all I could think was “grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat.”
After several minutes, during which time every passenger on the plane looked like they were searching for Waldo, a flight attendant came over to myself and the person sitting next to me (who randomly enough lived 2 floors below me freshman year), and explained the situation. Supposedly, the Indian man felt that he had been treated unfairly, and decided to tell the flight crew that he was going to track them all down at their hotel in Amsterdam (which he somehow knew the exact name and location of) and murder them all! I guess in the post-9/11 world, this doesn’t fly too well. Anyhow, we were told that if the man flipped out once he figured out we were landing because of him, we should tackle him if he somehow made it up to our row (he was sitting about 4-5 rows behind us). Since the guy next to me was about 6’4, I think the flight attendant probably wanted me to handle this responsibility…
Well, after a rapid descent into Newfoundland (check that off the list of places visited), two police officers came onboard, escorted the man off, and took him away to his future home of federal prison – according to the crew, the MINIMUM sentence for threatening flight staff is 8 years.
Two hours later, after refilling with gas, we were back on our way to Amsterdam. What a way to start my trip…
