Like Writing 'Fire' in Your Journal While in a Crowded Theater

Having grown up as a window-seat kind of guy, I'm now a firm devotee of the airplane aisle seat. Post-9/11 (in all seriousness) I've decided that if some asshole's neck(s) needs to be snapped I'd rather be in the aisle and have a shot at it than end up tripping over some old lady in the seat next to me as I stumble into the aisle and end up sprawled out and a sitting duck. I know it's probably an idiotic pipe dream that I'd be able to do anything but it still puts my mind at total ease. And as someone who flies with some regularity (8-10 roundtrippers a year) that's important.

While I take this approach quite seriously, I nevertheless don't particularly care about the quality of airline I fly (having flown thousands of miles on sure-to-crash winners like Aeroflot, Pakistani International Airways and ValuJet). I'm also not one check out the other passengers on my flight. In fact, one special peeve of mine is people who try to read what I'm reading/writing. When I've felt like someone is doing that I've often thought of doing what I suspect one Frontier Airlines passenger did yesterday:

FBI agents and San Jose police spent several hours questioning a Santa Cruz man Wednesday after a fellow passenger on a Frontier Airlines jet from Denver glimpsed ``suicide bomber'' written on the man's journal.

Convinced the man wasn't part of terrorist plot, authorities then set him free.

``Whatever the person wrote in their journal was not against the law,'' police spokesman Enrique Garcia said.

But the writing was enough to alarm a passenger who notified a crew member on Flight 169 about 40 minutes after take-off that the man was acting bizarrely, writing in his journal and clutching his backpack.

Authorities boarded the plane and escorted the 36-year-old man off the jet after it landed safely at Mineta San Jose International Airport with 112 passengers aboard.

The legal distinction between writing the words ``suicide bomber'' and saying it aloud on a plane is all about ``context,'' said Special Agent LaRae K. Quy, spokeswoman for the FBI's San Francisco office.

I bet the guy writing in his journal felt the prying eyes of his dickhead aislemate and decided to have a little fun. Still, he's lucky the feds didn't use the shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach they did last month in Miami. More here from Airport Business.