Top Flight

The flight crew on Alaska Airlines Flight 241 from Mexico City to Los Angeles flew into a panic when three Mexican Jews decided it was time to daven. After wrapping themselves in tefillin and murmuring some strange-sounding incantations the flight attendants notified the security crew of strange suspicious behavior in the cabin prompting them to lock down the cockpit and issue a ground security alert. The plane landed safely at LAX met by fire crews foam trucks FBI agents Transportation Security Administration personnel and police. The three Jews were escorted off the plane and questioned by the FBI before being released to make their connecting flights.

The incident which took place last spring was surprising. Haven’t flight attendants learned by now what tefillin are? Apparently not even after all the publicity of the previous airborne embarrassment when the pilot of a US Airways early morning flight from New York to Louisville made an emergency “heroic” landing in Philadelphia in order to rescue his passengers from a terrorist bomb threat — which turned out to be a teenage boy putting on his morning tefillin.

When the plane landed in Philadelphia a frightened 17-year-old Caleb Leibowitz and his 16-year-old sister Dalia — on the way from White Plains to Louisville to visit their grandmother — were pulled off the plane to bomb-sniffing dogs police and the FBI. The apologetic flight attendant later explained that when she saw the young man putting funny-looking boxes on his head and arms she panicked when he began winding “wires” that protruded from those boxes all around his body.

But young Caleb shouldn’t have felt too bad. A few years back an Israeli chassid was forced off an Air Canada Jazz flight from Montreal to New York because he was “swaying and mumbling” in his seat — and he wasn’t even “wired.”