From the BBC: “Budget airline Flybe advertised for actors to fly between Norwich and Dublin to boost passenger numbers and avoid a £280,000 commercial penalty.”

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It tops a story in the Sydney Morning Herald, which begins: “German supermarket shelves have been stocked with koala-shaped biscuits in a bid to lure more big-spending German tourists to Queensland.” Guess this campaign didn’t grab enough big-spending German koala lovers. 

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Oh, Forbes, how you amuse me so.

That’s right. It’s never going to get better. Thank you, Chicago Tribune.

Too hilarious to be completely true, unfortunately. A passenger apparently was watching a movie on an iPhone—“I Know What You Did Last Summer”—on an ATA flight to Hawaii. Casey, as the passenger identified himself or herself in a rambling letter to The Consumerist, was using an iPhone in “airplane mode,” a setting that apparently disables all of the device’s wireless capabilities and, thus, adheres to FAA rules against using cell phones in flight. It didn’t matter to the ATA flight attendant, apparently, and a ruckus ensued. 

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The headline comes from the New York Post. The monkey flew to the Big Apple from Lima, Peru via Fort Lauderdale, Florida with a passenger on Spirit Airlines. “Spirit,” as the airline opportunistically called the baby marmoset, was apparently the size of a person’s fist and hid under the man’s hat. “Other passengers asked the man if he knew he had a monkey on him,” said Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell. If the man didn’t know, then that’s a different story.

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Egad! What could the problem possibly be? Bed bugs? An unearthly scent not masked by the sweet scent of ‘unattended service’? No HBO on the tube? Nope. New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams just cannot handle the universal light switch in her plush hotel room. “Activate it and everything goes off,” she writes. “Everything. Ev-er-y-thingggg!”

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From The Mirror: “A British Airways pilot was forced to make an emergency landing after a passenger reclined his seat, annoyed the man behind him—and sparked a mid-air riot.” Twenty people were caught up in the brawl on the 747 from Lagos, Nigeria to London’s Heathrow airport, according to Mirror crime correspondent Justin Penrose. The weapons of choice: fists, bottles and belts. Sounds like the passengers would have been better off flying The “Zinedine Zidane 10.” (Via Jaunted.)

Related on World Hum:
* British Tabloid Travel Headline of the Day: ‘Boy, 12, Makes a Mockery of Air Security’
* British Tabloid Travel Headline of the Day: ‘Santa Claus in Travel Ban’
* British Tabloid Travel Headline of the Day: Fattie Ordered Off Ship

Photo by Hyougushi via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

The story from the Daily Mail: “A top level security probe is under way after a 12-year-old boy walked on to a plane unchecked with no documents at the height of the terror scare. The boy boarded a plane at Gatwick on Monday despite airport security being on red-alert.”

The Sun reports that Santa Claus lookalike David Powney had his passport application rejected because of his bushy white beard. 

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From the Daily Mail: “A holiday airline is investigating an incident in which passengers reported how cabin staff asked ‘fat people’ to move to the front of the aircraft to help with weight distribution. A stewardess said she needed ‘eight fat people’ to sit nearer the front because the captain of a half-full London-bound Thomsonfly flight was unhappy about the weight distribution, according to reports.”

That would be 24-stone Mark Wyatt of Folkestone, Kent, who was recently ordered to leave the Arctic-bound cruise ship Voyages of Discovery, according to a Sun report.