The Problem with Free Airline Tickets

The day we started a riot on a 737

A few years ago the Australian domestic airline Virgin Blue — the planes were painted bright red; it was an Aussie joke that puzzled tourists — had a generous “Free Flight” program for travel industry people, and a few of us were heading to a conference in Sydney.

One of my colleagues, a lovely old gentleman who had the surname of Gay, was boarding the flight when he found a passenger sitting in his assigned seat.

There was a vacant seat beside me in the row behind, so I waved my workmate up. We were near the back of the plane, and it didn’t matter much where we sat.

Mr Gay, whose surname had meant “merry, frolicsome” back in the Sixties when he’d been born, was a fun guy. Straight, despite the new meaning of the word, and he took a lot of ribbing, but he was good-natured about it, and I liked him a lot. Spending a couple of hours swapping travel stories while we drank airline booze sounded pretty good to me.

Then the wheels came off

An incoming flight landed and taxied to the stand beside us. I looked at it, and then nudged my companion. One of the tyres had obviously taken a hit and been shredded. Those puffs of smoke you see when an airliner lands? They are burning rubber, and after a while all the flat spots add up. Virgin had left this one go one flight cycle too long. It wouldn’t take more than an hour or so to swap out a new wheel and Mr Goodyear would have another five thousand bucks or so in his pocket, but any delay and there’d be a domino ripple through all the flights.

Our plane had boarded the last passenger, the door had closed, the jetway retracted, but we weren’t being pushed back. Not a good sign. Then the jetway was reattached, the front door opened, and a Virgin official came aboard and disappeared into the cockpit. A 737 isn’t a big plane, and you can see what’s happening inside from one end to the other.

“That 737 beside is probably the next Sydney flight after ours,” my friend said. “I’ll bet they are rounding up the early passengers and putting them on this one as well. They’ll squeeze every seat full, and likely push deadheads like us off until the midnight flight.”

Not good at all.

And then we could see the flight attendants making their way up the aisle. They each had a list in hand, and they would bend over, talk to a passenger who would glumly get up, pull their bag out of the overhead rack, and leave. Mr Gay and I looked at each other.

“Maybe we can hide in the toilets?” I suggested.

But it was too late. A flight attendant was talking to the passenger in the row ahead, checking the seat number against her list.

“Are you Gay?”

The man shyly nodded that he was, and she told him, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to get off, and we’ll put you on a different flight.”

Uh-oh. My colleague, seeing what was happening, stood up to help sort things out, “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m Gay!”

I could see the jig was up and started to rise, when a man across the aisle yelled out angrily. “Hell, I’m gay too! They can’t kick us all off!”

Other passengers started speaking up, saying they couldn’t remove all gays from the flight and what about lesbians like that lady there — thanks a lot, buster! — and they were live streaming to Twitter, and it just went downhill from there.

Especially after I saw a flight attendant I recognised and waved him over to help sort out the mess, “Hi, Jack!”

Britni

More travel with Britni: