One of America’s most talented musicians, Billie Joe Armstrong, has been kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight because his pants sagged too low.
Armstrong, who works occasionally as an actor, is better known as lead vocalist, main songwriter and lead guitarist for the US punk rock band Green Day. He’s also a guitarist and vocalist for the punk band Pinhead Gunpowder.
The rock musician was travelling from Oakland near San Francisco to Burbank Los Angeles when the pants incident occurred.
“Just got kicked off a Southwest flight because my pants sagged too low! What the f**k? No joke!” Armstrong tweeted indignantly.
It seems Armstrong may have been guilty of “sagging” – the term for wearing trousers (slacks, shorts, pants or jeans) hanging below the waist area and therefore revealing underwear.
A female passenger aboard the flight gave US news network ABC News the low-down. Passengers were already seated for takeoff, she said, when a flight attendant approached Armstrong and told him to pull his trousers up. Armstrong retorted: “Don’t you have better things to do than worry about that?”
The flight attendant then insisted the pants be hoisted higher. Armstrong replied “I’m just trying to get to my f**king seat” whereupon Armstrong and his travelling companion were removed from the flight.
In June, a football player, Deshon Marman, was evicted from a US Airways flight over saggy pants and is reportedly suing the airline over it.
Sagging, which often reveals buttocks and/or underwear, faces a widening crackdown by authorities, who consider the practice offensive and unsavoury. The Texas city of Fort Worth moved two months ago to ban passengers from boarding buses while wearing sagging pants that expose underwear or buttocks. Signs have been posted reading: “Pull ’em up or find another ride”.
The origins of sagging are obscure. The fashion is widely believed to derive from the US prison system, where belts are prohibited. Whatever, sagging is spreading.
In a similar case last month, a female financial consultant and former model claimed she was ordered off a JetBlue flight, not because she was sagging but because the flight director accused her of not wearing any panties.
Financial advisor Malinda Knowles is suing JetBlue, claiming that one of the airline’s supervisors thrust a walkie-talkie between her legs in an attempt to work out what she was wearing under her baggy T-shirt.
Knowles claims the supervisor told her, “‘I don’t want to see your panties or anything but do you have any on?”
The sagging and panties incidents follow a spate of strange in-flight happenings around the world. Some have involved passengers urinating in aircraft aisles and over other passengers. In other cases, passengers have stripped naked.
Written by : Peter Needham
(Source: eglobaltravelmedia.com)
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