Lux Alptraum expected a pleasant flight back from Chicago to LaGuardia.  Who doesn’t look forward to landing in Queens?  When her seat mate sat down, he seemed pleasant enough.  Then came the iPad.  From Jalopnik :

But as the plane started moving, and he pulled out his iPad, I started to get a bad feeling about things. At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt: who among us hasn’t wanted to flout the electronics rule? Who among us really thinks that that one iPad is going to send the plane crashing to its doom? I figured he was just trying get one over on the flight crew, and that, when they inevitably asked him to turn the iPad off, he’d politely honor their request and that would be that.

As I’d predicted, one of the flight attendants did come over and ask Mr. No-Fly to turn off his iPad. But instead of simply apologizing and turning off his iPad, my neighbor responded with, “Wait, so you mean that if my iPad is on, the entire plane can’t take off? I had no idea I had so much power!”

No doubt he thought he was being funny.  When waiting for a plane to take off, nothing is funny.  After turning it off, he played the game again, and again was caught and admonished.

The second time the flight attendant asked Mr. No-Fly to turn off his iPad, he was less forgiving. This time, there were threats involved: if the iPad wasn’t turned off, the plane would go back to the gate, and police could explain FAA regulations to the offending passenger in person. Shortly after this second warning, the plane’s captain came on the intercom to remind passengers that, yes, the electronics rule was an FAA regulation and serious business, and something that needed to be followed. That seemed to do the trick: Mr. No-Fly finally stowed his iPad, and it seemed, at last, that we could all put this whole nasty business behind us.

The plane was now facing an hour and a half wait to take off, and so Alptraum’s seat mate asked for an alcoholic beverage, having already been denied one addiction.  The stew refused.

This set him off again. I didn’t quite catch his side of the argument, but the flight attendant—who’d clearly been warned about him by her coworker—announced that she wasn’t a waitress, but a safety professional, and that dealing with his petty concerns was not her priority. In fact, she was ready to throw him off the plane right then and there.

The plane finally took off, but it was decided that he was not a good candidate for heavy drinking, and the flight crew refused to serve him a drink.  He decided to engage in another fight.

And not just a fight: a fight that involved Mr. No-Fly getting out of his seat and following the beverage cart as it made its way to the very back of the plane. I’m not sure why he thought this was a good idea, I’m not sure how he thought it was going to get him alcohol: I suppose he just assumed that since he hadn’t gotten into any real trouble yet, this would be just another infraction that he could talk his way out of.

When finally the plane landed at LaGuardia Airport, Alptraum assumed that her “interesting flight” was over and all would go home to sleep it off.  Instead, he was met by police.

I thought they might have let him off easy, that he might have just gotten some sort of ticket and been allowed to go on his way. But in the cab line outside LaGuardia, one of the flight attendants told me that, not only was he arrested, he’d also be added to the no-fly list for a pretty long time.

Let there be no doubt whatsoever that this fellow was a monumental jerk.  I’m surprised I can’t guess who it is, since we have so few monumental jerks in New York.  His behavior was atrociously rude and shockingly narcissistic.  We have so few narcissists as well.  And he did, of course, violate the rule against electronic devices.  Damn the allure of the iPad.

But the No-Fly list isn’t a punishment for bad boys, or a means of removing annoying people from the ranks of air travelers.  As the Transportation Safety Administration explains:

The “No-Fly” list has been an essential element of the aviation security – it keeps known terrorists off planes. TSA and our Federal partners, including the intelligence and law enforcement communities, have worked together to combine our collective knowledge into one list that protects our country, transportation systems, and airline passengers.

Or anyone who pisses off a stewardess.  And those who can’t control their iPad addiction.

It’s not that anyone, myself included, will feel any particular sympathy toward this fellow, and few of us would want him to plop his butt down in the seat next to us, or even on the same plane, but this is not what the No-Fly list is for.  Then again, as long as there is a list, and the list keeps people off planes with the government’s might, why not make the flight crew’s life a little happier and use it to keep the major annoyances out of their hair.  Oh, come on.  What could it hurt to take a list designed to protect us from terrorists and use it to remove annoyances.

It’s not like it could ever happen to us.  It’s not like we have iPads.