Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010
Flight Attendant Goes Awol
Everybody has a nightmare air travel story. Often it involves a crying baby, a pungent passenger, turbulence or all three. Few feature a rogue flight attendant quitting. But Steven Slater, working the Pittsburgh to New York route on Jet Blue, had apparently enough. After he was hit on the head as a passenger tried to open an overhead bin during taxiing, Slater got on the intercom, announced his intention to quit, grabbed a beer and deployed the emergency slide. He was arrested later that afternoon and released on bail. He soon parted ways with JetBlue and managed to avoid jail time by agreeing to undergo mental-health and substance-abuse treatment. But he has a new gig: doing web-commercials in rap.