'Every pilot's dream.'

Air Safety Week,  Jan 23, 2006  

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Here's the scenario: an inebriated passenger passes beyond the "just a little bit loud" stage and well into being downright obnoxious. Instead of making everyone else -- flight crew and passengers -- put up with his antics for the rest of the long flight, the pilot makes an unscheduled landing, has the local police escort the offending passenger off the craft, and proceeds on through the friendlier and quieter skies. That is just what a Monarch pilot did on Dec. 29, on a flight from Manchester Airport (MAN) in the UK to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Just when the situation in the cabin had reached the point of being truly unbearable, the tiny Portuguese island of Porto Santo suddenly presented itself as an impromptu stopover (as one editorialist noted, it isn't exactly kosher to open a door over the ocean and push the drunk out). After spending a couple of nights in an island jail, the passenger -- whose name was withheld -- took a two-hour ferry to Madeira, where he got a connecting flight on another airline to Tenerife. Monarch said the man had been given several opportunities to change his behavior, which was deemed to be too dangerous to the other 200 passengers. After his truncated vacation stay in Tenerife, the man faces charges in a Portuguese court.

[Copyright 2006 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]

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