Travel and Leisure sees him as a “first class Robin Hood.” American Airlines saw him as a disruptive passenger and booted him from a flight.
The controversy? It seems the unidentified first-class flier tried to sneak drinks to two of his buddies in economy and got busted.
Another passenger on the plane, Katie Genter, writes about what happened at the Points Guy.
After the man boarded the weekend flight from Philadelphia to Atlanta, he ordered two PDBs, or pre-departure beverages, saying (falsely) that one was for a woman in a nearby seat. Then he tried to walk both back to economy, but a flight attendant stopped him and didn’t buy his argument that he wanted to use the bathroom back there while double-fisting his drinks.
At that point, the man apparently texted his friends to come up to first class on the pretext of using the bathroom, but they were stopped at the threshold.
The first-class passenger again spoke with the flight attendant, to no avail, and an airline manager soon appeared and asked the passenger to leave the plane. (His buddies remained in economy.)
“The customer caused a disruption during the boarding process,” the airlines says in a statement. “We did offer to rebook the customer on a later flight, but he declined and we provided a full refund.”
Both sites note that it’s technically illegal for plane passengers to drink booze unless it is served to them by a flight attendant. (This family got kicked off a plane over birthday cake.)