Monday, December 26, 2016

A Hero For Our Times

Koreans sure love them some drama when it comes to air travel.  Not too long back there was Nut-gate, where a high-ranking Korean Air exec lost her mind when she wasn't given a complimentary dish of nuts before takeoff.  Now, we have 80's pop-star Richard Marx (!) and his wife Daisy Fuentes (!!) saving a planeload of Korean passengers from a drunk asshole / "businessman":
"South Korea’s biggest airline has defended its staff after the US pop singer Richard Marx said he had helped restrain a violent passenger during a flight and accused the crew of being 'ill trained' to deal with incidents of air rage.
Marx, who had several hits in the 1980s and 90s, said he and his wife, the TV host Daisy Fuentes, were on a Korean Air flight from the Vietnamese capital Hanoi to Seoul on Tuesday when a male passenger assaulted the person sitting next to him.
After female cabin attendants spent four hours attempting to subdue the man, Marx, 53, and another male passenger stepped in and tied him up with a rope."
My first thought before watching the (widely available) videos of the incident was, of course Korean Air stewardesses couldn't restrain a crazy person.  They weigh 90 pounds at most soaking wet, and are hired for their looks above and beyond anything else.  (This is true of most Asia-based carriers.)

Granted, US carriers are complete dumpster fires when it comes to customer service but at least they wouldn't take more than a few minutes to incapacitate, one way or another, a drunken dickhead.

The fact that this guy was allowed to literally terrorize an entire flight for four hours, the stewardesses were helpless, and the captain apparently did nothing makes me wonder if paying a few hundred dollars more for objectively better service on Korean Air or Asiana is ever worth it.

Oh, and the best part -- the guy was let free by the police because he was too drunk.  As far as I know, South Korea is the only country on earth where being a drunken asshole is one of the best legal defenses you can mount.

And the symbolism of a stewardess holding a taser but not knowing how to use it is about as Korean as it gets.  Appearance always trumps actual competence here, especially when it comes to matters of public safety.

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