Angry tiger, bag of nuts

Some people just have their standards, ya know?

Take Cho Hyun-ah for instance.  You remember her as the former big shot at Korean Air who went flippo in 2014 when she asked a flight attendant for nuts, and was given a bag of nuts rather than a nice nutdish of nuts.

Cho is the daughter of the airline's chairman, and had been given the sinecure position as "head of cabin service" at the company, so she wrecked it all by going nuts about the nuts and demanding that the attendant be taken off the flight, which meant they had to turn the plane around and go back to the gate at Kennedy Airport in New York, resulting in flight delays that continue to this day, some four years later.

Cho Hyun-ah

They don't take this sort of thing so lightly in Seoul. She was charged and tried and given one year in prison, but then a high court cut down the term to ten months and suspended it. 

That ought to teach her!

The Korean Supreme Court decided that diverting a plane as it taxied down the runway to takeoff did not mean that the plane's route was changed, although that would seem to be the very definition of the term "changing the route."

And all this over a bag of nuts. 

Macadamia nuts, to be exact. I love 'em, and if you handed me a sack o' macs, I would not protest. But Cho did, and according to the official report on what has become known as the "nut rage incident," she forced the flight attendant, Kim Do-hee, to be removed from the flight, and called over cabin crew chief Park Chang-jin to listen to her whine. The report also points out that Park "was forced to kneel down before her and beg for forgiveness. Cho repeatedly struck his knuckles with the edge of a digital tablet, and immediately dismissed him."

And a crew member said that she was behaving "like an angry tiger."

It also came to light that in 2013, Cho had attacked a flight attendant over some poorly cooked ramen noodles.

Every now and then, well-intended friends and relations will ask me why the missus and I are not in the habit of hopping a plane to journey here, there, and everywhere.  I wish to thank the Korean Supreme Court, and Ms Cho, for yet another reason not to get on an airplane. The very notion of being 8 miles up in the air in a flying metal tube while being served nuts in a bag, or undercooked noodles, is just too abhorrent to consider.

Her dad, the chairman and CEO of Korean Air, is Cho Yang-ho, whose two sons, Donald, Jr, and Eric, were not involved in this fracas.