Salon.com > Flying

Woman escorted off plane for singing Whitney Houston song nonstop

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:31:00 +0000

An American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York made an emergency landing in Kansas City, Mo., to let off a female passenger who refused to stop singing "I Will Always Love You," the Dolly Parton song later covered and popularized by Whitney Houston.

The woman has been released without charges, but American Airlines has refused to fly her to New York. "The woman was being disruptive and was removed from the plane for interfering with the flight crew," said Kansas City International Airport spokesman Joe McBride. "There was a federal air marshal on the aircraft, who subdued the woman and put her in cuffs and removed her from the plane."

TSA to study health effects of X-Ray body scanners

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 18:56:00 +0000

Following months of congressional pressure, the Transportation Security Administration has agreed to contract with the National Academy of Sciences to study the health effects of the agency's X-ray body scanners. But it is unclear if the academy will conduct its own tests of the scanners or merely review previous studies.

The machines, known as backscatters, were installed in airports nationwide after the failed underwear bombing on Christmas Day 2009 to screen passengers for explosives and other nonmetallic weapons. But they have been criticized by some prominent scientists because they expose the public to a small amount of ionizing radiation, a form of energy that can cause cancer.

My fear of flying

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

If you go by the law of averages, a baseball player who gets a hit in seven consecutive at-bats is really pushing his luck when he steps to the plate for the eighth time. This is the logic that kept me from flying for more than 16 years.

My first four flights were all involuntary, products of the dictatorship that state and federal law grants parents over their offspring. So I had no recourse when Mom and Dad planned a family trip to Georgia in the summer of 1989. I was 9 years old and already suffering from a raging case of aerophobia. The proximate source of this affliction was the horrific tragedy of Pan Am Flight 103, which had exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, a few months earlier. The news reports had gripped me. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it must have been like for the passengers – sitting there comfortably, maybe talking, maybe sleeping, maybe watching a movie, and then in a micro-second a quick crack of noise followed instantly by … an eternity of nothingness. None of them ever saw it coming, or had any chance to do anything about it. The only way they could have saved themselves that day would have been by staying off that flight.