Smells loves boxes just as much as any other cat, but his affinity for tight spaces almost landed him in Florida, a long way from his home in Brooklyn.
It was a tuft of orange hair poking out from the zipper of a carry-on suitcase that first alerted a TSA agent that something weird was going on.
The agent, who was processing a traveler departing from New York’s JFK airport on Tuesday morning, then consulted an x-ray scan, confirming the suitcase contained some unusual cargo — a ginger tabby cat tucked in among toiletries, snug and napping comfortably in the enclosed space.
An x-ray scan revealed Smells tucked snugly into the suitcase. Credit: TSAThe incriminatory tuft of orange hair that gave away Smells’ hiding spot. Credit: TSA
As for the traveler, the cat didn’t belong to him, nor was he aware kitty had climbed inside. It turned out he had been a house guest of friends living in Brooklyn, and the cat named Smells had slipped into the luggage before he left for home, for what is a suitcase if not just another box?
The TSA confirmed the story with the cat’s owner before letting the traveler board his Florida-bound flight.
“An officer called and asked if I wanted to press charges” said Alix, Smells’ 37-year-old human. “He wanted to know if there was any reason [the passenger] was trying to steal my cat and go to Florida.”
A TSA security agent opens the suitcase to reveal its unauthorized would-be stowaway. Credit: TSA
After Alix assured the TSA agent that Smells “really likes to check out boxes” and definitely would have climbed in on his own, she hired a driver to retrieve the kitty, who was unperturbed by the adventure.
“I was worried he’d be freaked out but he wasn’t even meowing on the way back,” Alix told the New York Post. “I went to give him some extra treats and he acted like nothing had happened.”
As for the TSA — which often deals with more serious finds like guns and drugs secreted into passengers’ luggage — the saga of Smells was a welcome change that gave them a good story and some laughs.
“On the bright side,” TSA spokesman Lisa Farbstein wrote on Twitter, “the cat’s out of the bag and safely back home.”
“She’s not showing you her baby because it’s a cat. A feline! A house pet!”
I’m just going to present this here without comment, because nothing I can say can possibly make this any better than it is. If you’re unfamiliar with the original saga of breastfeeding cats at 40,000 feet, read our previous post here.
There have been more than 5,000 confrontations involving unruly passengers on airlines in 2021, on pace for more than all other years combined.
When we first heard about an airline passenger grossing out her fellow travelers by breastfeeding her cat, we figured at least kitty was happy with the situation — but apparently not, according to a flight attendant who was involved in the incident.
Instead of purring and kneading in a milk coma, the cat — likely a Sphinx — wanted nothing to do with feeding from the woman’s breast on the flight in late November, flight attendant Ainsley Elizabeth said.
“This woman had one of those, like, hairless cats swaddled up in a blanket so it looked like a baby,” Elizabeth said in a video about the incident. “Her shirt was up and she was trying to get the cat to latch and she wouldn’t put the cat back in the carrier. And the cat was screaming for its life.”
“What does she do at home if she’s doing that in public?” Elizabeth asked. “And then security met the flight just to tell her that she couldn’t do that again, cause it was weird and gross.”
Elizabeth has since deleted the social media account she used to upload the video.
As we noted in our earlier post, the woman was uncooperative when flight attendants asked her to stop, prompting the pilot to send a message ahead to the destination airport via ACARS, short for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System.
An ACARS message sent from Delta Air flight DL1360 to ATL, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The bizarre incident happened aboard a Delta Airlines flight from Syracuse, NY, to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia.
Meanwhile, Delta airlines has begun an investigation into the Great Breastfeeding At 40,000 Feet saga, after the incident went viral last week and garnered headlines around the world — including newspapers in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and dozens of non English-speaking nations.
Initially the passenger was reprimanded, but an investigation could result in more serious consequences, like a ban on using the airline.
In-air confrontations have skyrocketed in 2021, mostly due to disagreements over COVID-19 safety rules such as wearing masks. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The story comes amid a general surge in violent attacks and tense confrontations aboard passenger jets — and now the FBI is getting involved.
That puts 2021 on track for more cases than all other years combined, according to the Association of Professional Flight Attendants. The majority of those incidents — as many as three out of every four — are related to confrontations over mask policies due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Teddy Andrews, a long time flight attendant with American Airlines, testified before a congressional committee in September, recalling an incident in which a passenger called him the n-word when Andrews asked the man to wear his mask.
“These days I come to work anticipating disruptive behavior,” Andrews told USA Today. “Our colleagues are anxious, fearful. What is going to happen on the next flight? How will this passenger react if I remind them to wear their mask? Will complying with airline policies set them off? Can I avoid engaging, or would that be an evasion of my duties?”
“Emotional support snakes,” passengers breastfeeding cats, people being violent jerks to flight attendants: This is why airlines take away privileges.
As more airlines scoff at the idea of emotional support animals and banish pets to cargo compartments, selfish air travelers remind us why.
Like a woman on a Delta flight en route to Atlanta last week, who grossed out fellow passengers by breastfeeding her cat. Flight attendants asked the woman to stop and place her cat back inside its carrier, as per FAA rules, but she refused.
That prompted the pilot to send a message ahead to the destination airport via ACARS, short for Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System:
An ACARS message sent from Delta Air flight DL1360 to ATL, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The pilot asked for a ground team to meet the passenger aircraft upon landing. It’s not clear if the woman was prohibited from traveling on the airline in the future.
Regardless, as press reports note, Delta has been dealing with an 84 percent uptick in emotional support animal-related incidents, which comes amid a dramatic spike in general incidents aboard passenger jets. As of September, there were already three times as many incidents compared to the whole of 2019, and the FAA had handed out more than $1 million in fines, a CNN report noted. (Data for 2020 isn’t particularly useful as a point of comparison because air travel remained restricted for months due to the pandemic.)
It’s gotten so bad that flight attendants are quitting and airlines are worried about being unable to staff flights, as most don’t have enough attendants to provide a full crew complement as it is. And who can blame these flight attendants, who are already overworked and perform an often thankless job that should not include acting as law enforcement at 40,000 feet?
One flight attendant told the New York Times she feels like her and her colleagues are “like punching bags for the public,” while others say the job has become dehumanizing.
“What really hurts are the people who won’t even look at you in the eye,” she said. “I don’t even feel like a human anymore.”
Emotional support animals are supposed to be fairly rare and reserved for people with extreme anxiety. Instead, we’ve had a parade of assholes in the past few years demanding they be allowed to travel with “emotional support snakes” among other ridiculous companion animals. A Delta spokesperson said the airline had fielded demands from people with “comfort turkeys, gliding possums known as sugar gliders, snakes, spiders, and more.”
Then there’s “Flirty the Emotional Service Horse,” whose owner also maintains an Instagram page for the animal which informs visitors that Flirty prefers the gendered pronouns “she/her.”
What. An. Asshole.
Above: A selfish person.
Speaking not only as a cat caretaker, but one who is very attached to my little dude, did I like the idea of leaving him back in New York for almost a month when I went to Japan before the pandemic? No. Of course not. I missed him terribly.
Did I enjoy the 14-plus hours it took to fly to Haneda Airport? Of course not. On top of existing anxiety issues I can’t vape on a plane and I don’t like confined spaces.
But boo fucking hoo.
The rest of us just get on with it. We’re already pampered and accommodated beyond what we deserve in most circumstances. We should all have empathy, and we should all have respect for people who suffer from anxiety, but your right to comfort yourself ends at the point where I have to smell a horse’s ass for the six hours it takes to cross from New York to LA. Are passengers just supposed to endure it when the horse defecates? Is a single person’s comfort more important than the discomfort of entire rows of passengers surrounding her?
There are animal welfare issues here as well. No one should be allowed to take a wild animal on a passenger flight, and there’s a strong argument to be made that bringing a damn horse — or even a duck, for that matter — onto a flight is tantamount to animal abuse. Given the choice, those animals would not be there.
We live in an era of living indictments of the American education system who think the Constitution grants them the right to shit all over everyone else as long as it makes them feel good. There is no such right.
And the more that people abuse the privilege of taking an emotional support animal on a flight, the greater the chance that the people who genuinely need them will no longer be allowed the option.
A Russian man makes a painful sacrifice for his chonktastic cat, Viktor.
Mikhail Galin loves his cat Viktor, that’s for sure.
The 34-year-old Russian and his feline flew from Riga, the capital of Latvia, to Moscow without any incident on Nov. 6, but when Galin checked in for an 8.5-hour flight to his destination in Vladivostok, he was told Viktor was too fat to fly in the cabin.
Officials from Aeroflot — Russian Airlines — told Galin there was an 18-pound limit for companion animals checked into the cabin, and at 22 pounds, the chonktacular Viktor was just too much chonk to hang with his human in business class. Instead, Viktor would have to tough out the long flight in cargo.
But Viktor was already stressed from traveling, and Galin wouldn’t take the flight without the cat by his side.
“I was very worried that during the duration of an eight-hour flight, something would happen to him in the cargo and he wouldn’t survive the trip,” Galin told the Washington Post.
When he couldn’t persuade Aeroflot to let him board with Viktor, Galin turned to social media for help and found a couple sympathetic to his cause. Their cat, Phoebe, looked like a miniature Viktor.
Galin booked a business class ticket, met up with the couple at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, and presented Phoebe as the cat he was taking with him on the flight. After airline employees weighed Phoebe and waved Galin forward, he and his new friends switched Viktor back in for his smaller body double and parted ways.
The plan worked beautifully and Galin would have gotten away with it if he hadn’t celebrated the successful swap on social media. He couldn’t resist the temptation and posted photos of Viktor on the flight: One shows the chubby cat peeking out of his carrier next to a glass of champagne, while another shot has Viktor in Galin’s lap, man helping cat enjoy a bird’s eye view.
Viktor takes a liking to business class.
The post went viral, an unamused Aeroflot got wind of it, and after an investigation the company docked Galin almost 400,000 frequent flier miles, his entire stash. It also booted him from its bonus miles program entirely.
“The law is harsh, but it is the law,” Galin told NBC News, repeating a stoic Russian maxim about punishment. “I violated the rules, and the carrier has every right to take action.”
Thankfully the result wasn’t all bad and Galin was rewarded for his loyalty to his cat. He told the Post several cat food companies had offered a year’s worth of food free for the flabby feline, and other transportation companies offered free use of their services.
While one politician called for Aeroflot to relax its rules on pet weight, the government wisely stayed out of kitty affairs.
“I don’t believe the Kremlin can or should comment on a situation involving a cat,” a spokesman for Vladimir Putin deadpanned.
As for Viktor, he’s made it clear he expects the same level of comfort next time he flies.
“He liked business class a lot better than economy class,” Galin said, “because he considered himself superior.”
Pain In The Bud 