Look what air travel has come to: Things people try to take on planes--including wild and dangerous beasts!

Ever surprised at what people bring on to the plane?  

I am.  The last time I was waiting at Logan Airport in Boston to board a JetBlue flight to Los Angeles, I was struck by the cultural difference of the people who flew, especially those who were on the originating flight from California and those sitting around me.  A few of the people who were disembarking from CA caught my attention, particularly a young man in his low-twenties who wore a torn tee shirt, baggy shorts, and flips--and who also had decided to carry his belongs from the West to the East in a twirled, green, standard-issue trash bag.  All which got me to thinking about what strange things people appear to carry on to airplanes.  

Carry-ons that didn't make the flight.

In a blog by Bekkie, there's a report of strange things people try to bring on planes--even now, eight years after 9-11:  knives, corkscrews, baseball bats, clubs, 20-in Costa Rican machetes, brass knuckles, nunchucks, golf clubs, 10-pound exercise weights, elective saws, chain saws, samurai swords, even a kitchen sink.  The list goes on.  She even reports that a couple of years ago a traveler tried to bring two gallons of gasoline on a flight because "he didn't want to run out of gas on the way home from the airport."  

Bet you weren't expecting this in the overhead compartment.

In my doing my homework on misguided carry-ons, I was unprepared for the MSNBC story that follows under the head "Crocodile blamed for Congo air crash"...

A crocodile stashed in a duffel bag got loose on an airplane, frightened passengers and led to a crash that killed 20 people on board, according to an inquiry into the accident.  The lone survivor of the crash in the Democratic Republic of Congo told the story to investigators, the U.K.’s Telegraph reported on Thursday. A British pilot was among the dead.

The plane was on a routine domestic flight from the capital of Kinshasa to a regional airport in Bandundu when the bizarre tale unfolded on Aug. 25.

An unnamed passenger had hidden the crocodile in a large duffel bag with the intent of selling the reptile, according to the Telegraph. The animal escaped as the plane approached its destination.  Pandemonium ensued.

"The terrified air hostess hurried towards the cockpit, followed by the passengers," a report obtained by the Telegraph said. The plane then became unstable, "despite the desperate efforts of the pilot." The plane crashed into a home a few hundred feet from the airport, though the people who lived in the residence were not in the house.  The crocodile reportedly survived the crash but was killed by a blow from a machete. 

The aircraft belonged to Filair, a private carrier, and was a Czech-made Let L-410 twin turboprop.  

It's not your father's airline any more.

I remember still, even now fifty years later, a minor-but-real dispute between my father, who was about to depart our house in California on a business trip via an American Airlines transcontinental flight, and my mother who at the last very last minute asked him if he would do her a favor and take some objects to her family he would be near when he arrived on the East coast.  

When she presented him with a brown paper bag in which she had placed the presents, he immediately drew back in shock that she would expect him to take a shopping bag on a commercial flight with other travelers.  After all, he declared, respectable people simply don't do that kind of thing--it was unacceptable to think she'd have him carry on a paper bag on such a flight, it just wasn't to be done!

He departed for the airport without the presents, all dressed up in a suit--just like all the other people who would be on the same flight.  He was pretty sure he didn't want to risk the social judgments of those around him on the way.

Oh my, how different it is today!

Look how far we have all come in the world of commercial air travel...from people who dressed up to go on a trip, to people who wear flip-flops and carry their clothes in twisted trash bags, to those who bring electric saws and gasoline and now...crocodiles!  What under the sun could possibly be next?!!  
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