Man trapped in toilet on 15-hour flight

**mashman** · 19th June 2014, 19:52

"A police officer told the South China Morning Post he didn’t appear to have suffered any injuries to his finger."

Is there a comma required after the word injuries?

**unstuck** · 19th June 2014, 20:17

A yank, someone is going to be sued for sure. Enough of the toilet humor anyway.

**R650R** · 20th June 2014, 16:51

Sounds very much like the 'Blue arm" incident from HST's Curse of lono book lol...

""We were about forty minutes out of San Francisco when the crew finally decided to take action on the problem in Lavatory IB. The door had been locked since takeoff and now the chief stewardess had r1 summoned the copilot down from the flight deck. He appeared in the aisle right beside me, carrying a strange-looking black tool in his hand, like a flashlight with blades, or some kind of electric chisel. He nodded calmly as he listened to the stewardess's urgent whispering. "I can talk to him," she said, pointing a long red fingernail at the "occupied" sign on the locked toilet door, "but I can't get him out."

There was no answer, but I was close enough to the door to hear sounds of movement inside: first, the bang of a toilet seat dropping, then running water.. . ,

I didn't know Mr. Ackerman, but I remembered him coming aboard. He had the look of a man who had once been a tennis pro in Hong Kong, then gone on to bigger things. The gold Rolex, the white linen bush jacket, the Thai Bhat chain around his neck, the heavy leather briefcase with combination locks on every zipper. . . . These were not signs of a man who would lock himself in the bathroom immediately after takeoff and stay inside for almost an hour.

Which is too long, on any flight. That kind of behavior raises questions that eventually become hard to ignore—especially in the spacious first-class compartment on a 747 on a five-hour flight to Hawaii. People who pay that kind of money don't like

the idea of having to stand in line to use the only available bathroom, while something clearly wrong is going on in the other one.

There is no possible economic argument for a genuinely private place of any kind on a ten million dollar flying machine. The risk is too high.

No. That makes no sense. Too many people like Master Sergeants forced into early retirement have tried to set themselves on fire in these tin cubicles . . . too many psychotics and half-mad dope addicts have locked themselves inside, then gobbled pills and tried to flush themselves down the long blue tube.

The copilot rapped on the door with his knuckles. "Mr. Ackerman! Are you all right?"

He hesitated, then called again, much louder this time. "Mr. Ackerman! This is your captain speaking. Are you sick?" "What?" said a voice from inside.

The stewardess leaned close to the door. "This is a medical emergency, Mr. Ackerman—we can get you out of there in thirty seconds if we have to." She smiled triumphantly at Captain Goodwrench as the voice inside came alive again. "I'm fine," it said. "I'll be out in a minute." The copilot stood back and watched the door. There were more sounds of movement inside—but nothing else, except the sound of running water.

By this time the entire first class cabin was alerted to the crisis. "Get that freak out of there!" an old man shouted. "He might have a bomb!"

"Oh my God!" a woman screamed. "He's in there with something!"

The copilot flinched, then turned to face the passengers. He pointed his tool at the old man, who was now becoming hysterical. "You!" he snapped. "Shut up! I'll handle this."

Suddenly the door opened and Mr. Ackerman stepped out. He moved quickly into the aisle and smiled at the stewardess. "Sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "It's all yours now." He was backing down the aisle, his bush jacket draped casually over his arm, but not covering it.

From where I was sitting I could see that the arm he was trying to hide from the stewardess was bright blue, all the way up to the shoulder. The sight of it made me coil nervously into my seat. I had liked Mr. Ackerman, at first. He had the look of a man who might share my own tastes .. . but now he was looking like trouble, and I was ready to kick him in the balls like a mule for any reason at all. My original impression of the man had gone all to pieces by that time. This geek who had

locked himself in the bathroom for so long that one of his arms had turned blue was not the same gracious, linen-draped Pacific yachtsman who had boarded the plane in San Francisco.

Most of the other passengers seemed happy enough just to see the problem come out of the bathroom peacefully: no sign of a weapon, no dynamite taped to his chest, no screaming of incomprehensible terrorist slogans or threatening to slit people's throats. . .. The old man was still sobbing quietly, not looking at Ackerman as he continued to back down the aisle toward his own seat, but nobody else seemed worried.

The copilot, however, was staring at Ackerman with an expression of pure horror on his face. He had seen the blue arm— and so had the stewardess, who was saying nothing at all. Ackerman was still trying to keep his arm hidden under the bush jacket. None of the other passengers had noticed it—or, if they had, they didn't know what it meant.

But I did, and so did the bug-eyed stewardess. The copilot gave Ackerman one last withering glance, then shuddered with obvious disgust as he closed up his commando tool and moved away. On his way to the spiral staircase that led back upstairs to the flight deck, he paused right above me in the aisle and whispered to Ackerman: "You filthy bastard, don't ever let me catch you on one of my flights again."

I saw Ackerman nod politely, then he slid into his seat just across the aisle from me. I quickly stood up and moved toward the bathroom with my shaving kit in my hand—and when I'd locked myself safely inside I carefully closed the toilet seat before I did anything else.

There is only one way to get your arm dyed blue on a 747 flying at 38,000 feet over the Pacific. But the truth is so rare and unlikely that not even the most frequent air travelers have ever had to confront it—and it is usually not a thing that the few who understand want to talk about.

The powerful disinfectant that most airlines use in their toilet-flushing facilities is a chemical compound known as Dejerm, which is colored a very vivid blue. The only other time I ever saw a man come out of an airplane bathroom with a blue arm was on a long flight from London to Zaire, en route to the Ali-Foreman fight. A British news correspondent from Reuters had gone into the bathroom and somehow managed to drop his only key to the Reuters telex machine in Kinshasa down the aluminum bowl. He emerged about 30 minutes later, and he had a whole row to himself the rest of the way to Zaire.""