Smelling matches

Now here’s one you don’t hear very often. It seems an American Airlines flight from Washington Reagan National Airport to Dallas/Fort Worth, made an emergency landing after passengers reported smelling struck matches.

The plane landed safely. The FBI, Transportation Safety Ad- ministration and airport authority responded to the emergency. The passengers and five crew members were brought off the plane, together with all the luggage, to go through security checks again. Bomb-sniffing dogs found spent matches.

But what was the dastardly plot? Was it a shoe bomb? Had some- body snuck in some flammable liquid in tube of KY Jelly? Or was it worse…was somebody trying to smoke?

As it turns out it was none of these things.

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal a little personal flatulence. The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane.

While it is legal to bring as many as four books of paper safety matches onto an aircraft, it is illegal to strike a match in an airplane. Feeling compassionate for the poor woman’s embarrassment, American Airlines has banned her from flying their airline for an indefinite period of time.